Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (2 page)

Tacoma had a moniker it had hoped would fade, “Kidnap Capital of the West.” In 1935, three years after the Lindbergh kidnapping, nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser, son of Washington’s timber baron, John Philip Weyerhaeuser, had been grabbed off a Tacoma street in broad daylight. His parents paid a $200,000 ransom, the boy was released unharmed, and an arrest was made within days. Then, two days after Christmas, 1936, a man had broken into the mansion of Tacoma physician William Mattson. The intruder picked up 10-year-old Charles and left a ransom note asking for $28,000. Dr. Mattson tried desperately to follow the kidnappers’ directions through notices in a Seattle newspaper, but communication broke down. Two weeks later the boy’s naked body was found on a snow-covered field 60 miles north in Everett. He had been tied up and carried around in the trunk of a car. He died from blows to the head. The Mattson murder was never solved.

Beverly was eight years old when Charles Mattson was kidnapped and killed, an irony not lost on adult Bev, because Ann was eight when she disappeared. Bev and her friends would ride their bikes past the Mattson house. She would point to it and say, “That’s where the boy was taken from.”

On the night before Ann disappeared, her friend Susie had dinner at the Burrs’. Ann had two invitations to sleepovers, but Bev said no because school was starting soon.

At 8:30 p.m., the family’s bedtime routine began. Greg and Julie, who was seven, went to the basement to spend the night in a fort they had made. Ann had a fungus under a fingernail, so Bev put mercurochrome on it and sent her and her three-year-old sister, Mary, upstairs to bed. Mary had broken her arm on a playground slide and was restless because of the cast on her arm.

Julie was just 14 months younger than Ann, and the girls shared a room. But because Julie was in the basement with Greg and Mary slept across the hall, Ann was alone. She took off her blouse, pedal pushers, and headband and put on the light blue nightgown with the blue and white flowers that Bev had sewn for her. Her doll, Tammy, wore an identical one. Ann never took off the necklace with the images of Jesus and Mary that she had received at her first Holy Communion in May. She also wore a bracelet that had her name, address, and phone number on it, just in case. The other side was engraved: Saint Christopher Protect Us.

Bev was exhausted from the warm weather and hadn’t been sleeping well. For a couple of weeks, both Bev and Don had imagined they heard noises in the yard at night. At about 11 p.m. they locked up. Don put Barney, Ann’s coal-black cocker spaniel, on the landing between the kitchen and the back door, and Bev put the chain lock on the front door. A living room window was open a couple of inches, so the wires to the TV antenna on the roof could

snake through. It was a new TV, and Don hadn’t found a way yet to accommodate the wires and also keep the window locked.

Late that night, Ann took Mary to their parents’ room. Mary was crying because her cast was itching. Bev said a few reassuring words and told Ann to take Mary back upstairs.

Finally, the family was asleep. Barney raised a fuss during the night, but they assumed he was barking at the wind. The next afternoon, the front page of the newspaper had a story about the storm. It had rained half an inch and hundreds of people had lost power.

HE CAREFULLY PLACED the knives around the sleeping girl, with the sharp, pointed ends closest to her neck and cheek. He didn’t rush. He was capable of being quiet and patient; he wanted to get it just right.

And then he giggled. His 15-year-old aunt, Julia, awoke, more than a little frightened to find little Teddy lifting the covers and placing butcher knives beside her. Teddy was clearly delighted to have scared her.

When Julia gathered the knives and took them back down to the kitchen, she told her mother about the incident. But no one else in the family thought it was strange. It came back to her years later, after Ted became a suspect in several kidnappings and murders.

The child who would grow up to be a killer of such magnitude that law enforcement had to invent a term for his kind of terror—serial killer—was only three years old, but already he knew the business end of a knife.

Later, knives would not be his weapon of choice; instead, he would use his charisma, and tire irons, a crowbar, wooden clubs, a cleaver, panty hose, an ice pick, a hatchet, a lug wrench, a meat tenderizer, a metal bed frame, handcuffs, and his teeth. But at age three, you work with what you’ve got.

In 1946, when Eleanor Louise Cowell found herself unmarried and pregnant, she traveled to the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. Since 1893, girls in the East had gone to stay at what was first known as the Home for Friendless Women. Louise (still known as Eleanor, until she moved west four years later) must have felt friendless. She was smart and popular in high school, but stayed close to home. She worked as a clerk at an insurance company near Philadelphia and lived in the family home with her parents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, and her two younger sisters. Samuel was a landscaper who owned a nursery in Roxborough, a community in northwest Philadelphia. Louise’s mother was a “shadowy figure,” dominated by her husband, suffering from depression and agoraphobia, and institutionalized more than once for shock treatments. She was ill much of her life and wasn’t able to protect her eldest daughter when Louise needed it.

When Louise was 21 or 22, a coworker introduced her to a man who said he was a veteran of World War II and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He implied there was family money. His name was Jack Worthington. The couple dated briefly, then Jack stopped calling. When she learned she was pregnant, Louise and her family’s minister tried to find Jack Worthington. It was a dead end; Jack Worthington had never attended the University of Pennsylvania, and he didn’t have the well-paying job he said he had. He either vanished, or hadn’t existed. That is the story that was told for years. There was a rumor that the father of Louise’s baby was really an older, married member of her church. And there was a more sinister explanation for her pregnancy; maybe the reason why her father never “took off” after Jack Worthington, why he insisted on bringing the baby back to Philadelphia, and why Louise remained ambivalent even late in her life about keeping the boy, was that Samuel Cowell was the father. Louise is the only one who knows who Ted’s father was, and beyond her tale of the mysterious Jack Worthington, she has never told.

Author Ann Rule, who knew Ted from his college years to the end of his life, always doubted the story of the vanishing birth father. “She never had a boyfriend, and suddenly she is pregnant?” Rule asked skeptically. She believes Ted’s grandfather was his father, and that’s why the baby was left at the Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Vermont for his first few months. “The first woman in his life had lied and betrayed him,” Rule said of the sense of abandonment Ted would experience his whole life.

The Cowell family was good at pretending problems didn’t exist, but it was hard to hide Louise’s pregnancy. She was president of the young people’s group at her church until word got around that she was pregnant; then she was asked not to attend. As her pregnancy advanced, and her mother was too ill to accompany her to Burlington and her sister too young, the minister’s wife made the journey with her. Two months later, on November 24, 1946, Louise gave birth to Theodore Robert Cowell. He weighed seven pounds, nine ounces, and the most his mother ever said about his birth was “there were no complications.”

She went home alone, leaving her baby son with no mother to bond with, which child-development experts say is critical in the first few months of life. It was her father who insisted they retrieve him. Polly Nelson, a pro bono attorney who worked for three years to halt Ted Bundy’s execution, believes Ted’s mother had made her decision when she left Vermont and that she never intended to keep Ted. Her father was “stern and scary. He insisted Louise not put Ted up for adoption,” Nelson said. “Three months alone in an orphanage; that’s about as traumatic as it gets. Louise always seemed ambivalent. My impression is she never changed her mind about putting him up for adoption.” Early in 1947, Louise returned to Vermont and collected the baby. They called him Teddy.

It was his first abandonment. Ted Bundy, who would have three names by the age of five, who would never know who his father was, who likely saw his beloved grandfather swing cats, kick dogs, and rage at his wife and daughters, would for his relatively short life feel a loneliness and a void that couldn’t be filled. Until he learned he could fill it by bludgeoning, raping, strangling, biting, and beheading young women.

When it came to the story of Ted’s conception, the family was secretive. His grandparents told some people— even family—that they had adopted a baby, but Teddy’s great-aunt Virginia Bristol was skeptical. “When I heard Louise was ‘not home’ I knew things were not right. Next thing I heard was that Sam and Eleanor had adopted a boy,” Bristol remembered years later. “I was smart enough to know damn well they weren’t adopting this baby. No adoption agency would’ve given them one; Eleanor wasn’t well enough to take care of one! I knew it had to be Louise’s baby. But they wanted to cover up. All we ever got was evasions. I had a very secretive brother.”

Others in the family were also skeptical of the “Jack Worthington” story but didn’t dare discuss it; Samuel Cowell flew into a violent rage whenever the subject of Ted’s paternity came up.

Ted told many versions of his parentage. He told some people that for years he believed his grandparents were his birth parents, and that Louise was his sister. At other times he said he always knew she was his mother. After Ted was arrested for murder, one of his teachers at Woodrow Wilson High School said that when Ted found out he was illegitimate, he “snapped.” When he was in college he told a friend that it wasn’t until a cousin teased him that he learned he was illegitimate.

He sobbed when he told a girlfriend what he knew of his birth, and he could appear resentful and ashamed of his mother. But other times he seemed to accept his illegitimacy with benign curiosity. Whether he was the product of incest, or a brief tryst with Jack Worthington or a family friend, could Ted’s rage at his mother and exposure to violent and disturbing behavior under his grandparents’ roof explain why Ted Bundy could commit such atrocious crimes against young women?

The stories related by Louise’s sisters and her aunts and uncles—Samuel’s own daughters and siblings—have a gothic quality. Samuel had a stash of pornography that the very young Teddy must have seen, perhaps the kind that featured bondage and murder; Samuel was cruel to animals; Samuel raged at his employees; Samuel was a bully. Samuel’s own brothers feared him and wished him dead; Samuel was “an extremely violent and frightening individual.”

The youngest daughter described her father as a tyrant. Julia was just 12 years old when Louise came home with the baby (in a few years, Julia would be the teenager Teddy loved to scare with knives). She said that her father was so angry when she overslept one morning, and she was so afraid of him, that when he pulled her out of bed she stumbled and fell down a short flight of stairs. Samuel’s sister said she always thought her brother was “crazy.” Maybe young Teddy was the only person in Samuel Cowell’s household who was
not
subjected to his verbal and physical abuse. Ted had only pleasant memories of those years, but it’s not uncommon for adults, especially killers, to repress early memories of abuse, whether witnessed or experienced.

Ted told his longtime college girlfriend that he was disciplined harshly as a child but told others it amounted to nothing more than spanking. He also told the girlfriend that he avoided the draft during the Vietnam War because he had broken an ankle “when he was back east” and it had never healed right. “Back east” was his first four years, living at his grandfather’s. Ted said he worshipped his grandfather, but he told a psychiatrist that Samuel Cowell was a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews. Ted confirmed that his grandfather tortured animals and kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse.

Julia described her older sister Louise as being much like their father—temperamental, secretive, and undemonstrative. The family was good at denial. Louise remained adamant that her son could not be guilty of killing dozens of women. After he was executed, she continued to refer to his crimes as “those things” or “those terrible things.”

Louise shrugged off questions about her father’s abusiveness and what Teddy may have witnessed. It was only near the end of Ted’s life that his mother revealed one family secret. Polly Nelson and psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis were trying to stop Ted’s execution; they believed that he had sabotaged his trials and that abuse he either experienced or witnessed as a child should have been part of his defense. But Ted and his mother were not forthcoming about his childhood—until it was too late. As Nelson wrote, “Ted’s mother, Louise, thinking that it was really her final chance to say something that could save Ted, called me at the hotel to admit that her father had been violent and probably had beat her mother. It was clearly a very, very difficult thing for her to say.”

Dr. Lewis was not surprised. It confirmed what she knew about the childhoods of serial killers: their families would rather their loved ones die than reveal ugly secrets that might save them from the electric chair.

A professor of psychiatry at Yale and New York University, Dr. Lewis was studying juveniles on death row in the maximum-security Florida prison where Ted was housed. His attorneys asked if she would evaluate him. She says Ted told her about his “terrible depressions.” She concluded that he fit other criteria she had formulated about people who murder. “Killers—not just serial killers—have been hideously abused as children,” Dr. Lewis said. “What we have found is early, ongoing abuse, and a combination of other factors, including brain damage. Neurologists were saying there is no relationship [between brain damage and violence] but there is.” Lewis’s critics say she is sympathetic to killers. But the theory she was documenting in the 1980s—that serial killers show signs of childhood abuse, mental illness (in Ted’s case, bipolar disorder), and brain damage—has gained credibility. The brains of killers are different from those of average adults.