Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (22 page)

The interview was taped the day before Ted was executed. Dobson asked him what the “antecedents” of his behavior was. Ted began by saying there was no physical, sexual, or emotional abuse in his childhood and that he grew up in a wonderful home. And then, Ted explained tearfully how he was influenced by pornography, beginning at a young age:

Ted: “As a young boy of 12 or 13, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature—more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography—and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience—is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces—as I know only too well—brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.

Before we go any further, it is important to me that people believe what I’m saying. I’m not blaming pornography. I’m not saying it caused me to go out and do certain things. I take full responsibility for all the things that I’ve done. That’s not the question here. The issue is how this kind of literature contributed and helped mold and shape the kinds of violent behavior.”

Ted: “In the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. Then, at a certain time, it is instrumental in crystallizing it, making it into something that is almost a separate entity inside.”

Ted talked about how alcohol further reduced his inhibitions. And then he went on to warn others who, like him, are vulnerable to violence in the media, “particularly sexualized violence.”

Ted: “Those of us who have been so influenced by violence in the media, particularly pornographic violence, are not some kind of inherent monsters. We are your sons and husbands. We grew up in regular families. Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home 20 or 30 years ago. As diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children, and as good a Christian home as we had, there is no protection against the kinds of influences that are loose in a society that tolerates [pornography]…”

The interview didn’t air until after Ted’s death. Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth called it “pure theater” and believed that Ted was engaged in “image burnishing.” In an article in the
New York Times,
publisher and pornographer Al Goldstein called the Dobson interview “Ted’s last lie.” Ann Rule thought Ted was manipulating Dobson. Even Carole Boone said Ted was telling people what they wanted to hear. But Polly Nelson said Ted was sincere in “wanting to get his message across about the dangers of violent pornography.”

Finally, in January, 1989, Ted ran out of time. He was very busy on his last day. He signed his five-page will; it was witnessed by three people and notarized. It provided “… for the payment of debts and expenses, payment of taxes, gifts of personal property, funeral arrangements, forwarding of mail after his death,” and appointed Diana Weiner as his personal representative. The will mentioned that Ted hoped to have his ashes scattered in the mountains of his home state.

Ted met with law enforcement authorities from Washington and Colorado but cancelled a meeting with police from Utah. No explanation was given. He gave investigators details on at least nine murders which he had been suspected of but never charged with. The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
said Ted confessed “to most of the thirty-six murders he had been suspected of in Washington, Utah, and Colorado between 1974 and 1975,” and he also took responsibility for two murders in Idaho to which he had not been previously linked. He confessed to a murder in California, but authorities there have not attributed a killing to him. (In 2011 there were new efforts to rule Ted Bundy in or out as a suspect in unsolved cases in several states.)

The newspaper reported that he appeared “shaken and at times sobbing.” Bill Hagmaier told the Florida prosecutor’s office that night that Ted could be linked to 50 murders. Dr. Art Norman put the number at 100. Ted had told Florida police that the number was three figures. He admitted to killings in six states; the FBI says it was seven. Ted told Ron Holmes he had committed murders in 10 states. Ted never admitted to his last murders, those of the two Chi Omega women and young Kimberly Diane Leach.
Ted also denied killing the two coeds at the New Jersey shore in 1969, and the murder of a young woman who worked at a motel next door to The Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. Ted had made a trip to Burlington (presumably in 1969) to try and learn more about his birth. The murder in Vermont happened July 19, 1971. It fit his modus operandi—the young woman was bludgeoned and raped—and an FBI report documenting his life between birth and death is nearly blank for that year. He attended the University of Washington and was working at a medical supply company. But his employment record, at whatever job he held, was notoriously spotty, and even Liz Kendall, his girlfriend, said he disappeared for days at a time. It is a tremendous coincidence—the murder of a 24-year-old woman near the place where Ted was born and temporarily abandoned. Ann Rule believed he might have been responsible for the crime.

Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth had asked to see him before he was executed, but he refused. Ted cancelled a news conference with 30 journalists that he had arranged. For about a week, Ted had been offering to trade more information about his killings in return for a delay in his execution. He even asked the families of his victims to intervene on his behalf; if they asked for a temporary stay of execution, he would have the time to give details about other missing girls. But Gov. Bob Martinez said he would not “negotiate with a killer.”

Ted asked to see Dr. Lewis again. She had seen him in the morning, and wasn’t permitted a second visit, but Polly Nelson was. Diana Weiner was present. Nelson and Weiner sat on one side of a glass partition; Ted sat on the other. Nelson told him about two last-minute appeals she was waiting to hear on, one in the Florida Supreme Court and the other in the U.S.Supreme Court.

Ted had various requests to sort through and there was one he wanted to talk to Nelson about. He had received a letter, supposedly from a doctor, offering to switch brains with him (presumably for research purposes). A more valid request came from Dr. Lewis. She asked Ted if he would agree to leave his brain for research, and had drafted a waiver for him to sign. Ted was interested in the possibility that he might have some brain defect that would explain his crimes. But Weiner was opposed to any part of Ted being denied a final resting place. In the end, he did not sign the waiver to donate his brain, although rumors got around: Bob Keppel heard that someone had kept Ted’s brain.

Ted had told Dr. Lewis earlier in the day that while everyone else wanted to know
what
he did, she was the only one who wanted to know
why.
He told her how he hadn’t known anything was wrong until he was “…twelve, fourteen, fifteen…” At one point, he asked her to turn off her tape recorder. She has never shared what their final conversation was, except to say that he discussed “how very, very young” he was when he began thinking about murder; he also wanted to talk about his rage at his mother. His “last thoughts and words were about his deep confusion and anger toward his mother,” Lewis said.

As their time came to an end, Lewis had planned to shake his hand and wish him well. But he suddenly kissed her on the cheek. She instinctively reached up and kissed him back. When she got home that night, she told her husband, also a psychiatrist, that she was “the last woman to kiss Ted Bundy.” That’s when her husband added, “And live to tell about it.”

Ted asked Nelson to use his interviews with her and Dr. Lewis “to explain that he was not a monster.” And then he stared into her eyes and asked if she and her co-counsel, Jim Coleman, had “liked” him. “Of course, Ted, of course,” she told him.

Nelson was called out of the room and got word that the Florida Supreme Court had ruled against Ted. When she returned, Ted had written a note. He wasn’t allowed to pass anything to her, so he held it up against the glass. “I hope you liked me. I hope this wasn’t just an unpleasant legal chore for you. I feel close to you now,” it read. It was a touching moment, but Nelson said that even in Ted’s last hours she never saw any remorse. “He felt sorry for himself but there was no sense of responsibility,” Nelson said.

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 against granting Ted a stay of execution. Nelson had left the prison by the time she heard the news, and telephoned Ted to tell him. He was quiet, and they said their goodbyes. Nelson believed both the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court were afraid to risk the “public outrage” that would follow another stay. Nelson called Louise Bundy and Carole Boone to tell them that time and hope were running out. “They were furious with Ted and felt deeply betrayed that he had publicly confessed without telling them first,” Nelson wrote. Ted’s last-minute revelations to police were all over the news. Nelson did not want to attend the execution, and asked Jim Coleman to go.

Ironically, Nelson was let go by her law firm three weeks after Ted was executed. Although it had asked her to take the pro bono case, her firm came to believe that
she
was somehow responsible for the long, “unsavory,” million dollar case. “It ruined the law for me. I never went back to litigation,” she said. She didn’t practice law again for 10 years, and then only because she began to specialize in business law. Nelson never disputed Ted’s guilt, but later wrote that, “…in seeing to prevent the killing of a person, I felt I was fulfilling a lawyer’s highest calling.”

Ted’s only contact visitors that evening—meaning they could sit with him without the glass separation—were John and Marcia Tanner. Nelson saw them entering as she left the prison in tears. “You two will be the last to see Ted,” Nelson said. “No, we won’t. The last will be Our Lord, Jesus Christ,” they told her, their eyes cast “skyward, their faces beaming.”

In the end, Ted had only his “best friends,” as he had described them to FBI agent Bill Hagmaier—the Tanners, Diana Weiner, and Hagmaier. Maybe they took the place of others who had given up on him. So many people in his life were not consoling him, not listening endlessly to him, no longer buying his lies.

Carole Ann Boone, her son, and her daughter with Ted were long gone. They had moved back to the Seattle area in 1986. The original move back was said to be because Carole’s mother had been injured in a car accident. An acquaintance of Carole’s believed that the notoriety of the case made it impossible for her to stay in Florida, and she was hurt by Ted’s relationship with Diana Weiner. According to Ted’s sister, his cousin, his attorneys, the police and the journalists who befriended Carole, no one knows where she and her daughter are. Ted’s cousin, Edna Cowell Martin, says the family never discusses her. Hugh Aynesworth believed that it was Carole Boone’s choice to keep herself and her children away from Ted’s family all these years.

Ted’s mother and step-father, and his half-siblings, did not go to Florida to say goodbye, something Polly Nelson found sad. In fact, his mother had not seen him for nearly two years before he was executed. Ted’s oldest sister, Linda Bussey, is angered when asked why no one went to see Ted. There was “no need” for an in-person goodbye, she said. Bussey dismisses the confessions Ted made the last week of his life, as he confirmed and shared information with various law enforcement agencies. She believed Ted did it because he was “bored.”

Regardless, his family has something sadly in common with the parents, family members, and friends of the girls and women he killed. “Have you had anyone close to you murdered? Have you? It’s a horrible thing,” Bussey said over and over, her voice filled with hurt and anger. To his family, Ted was a victim and was murdered, too. She’s correct about that; he was murdered. His death certificate from the State of Florida lists “homicide” as the cause of his death.

In a story in the
Tacoma News Tribune
a few days before the execution, reporter Chuck Doud wrote about Don Burr’s reaction to the impending death of Ted Bundy: “We’ve lived all our lives with Ted Bundy,” Don said. “I will personally be relieved that, come Tuesday, this will all be over.” Don had never forgotten the face of the teenager he had seen standing near a ditch at the UPS campus and watching the search for Ann. With time, it had become Ted’s face. In a scene that sounds more like something out of the 1950s than 1989, Bev and Don spent the eve of Ted’s execution listening to the radio, hoping to hear that he had confessed to more killings, specifically Ann’s, prior to his death. He did not.

That evening, January 23, 1989, Doud and photographer Russ Carmack, of the
Tacoma News Tribune,
waited with Louise and Johnnie Bundy in their home in North Tacoma. A minister was present, but they were the only reporter and photographer. Carole Boone had introduced Doud to the Bundy’s a few years before. “I began to know the family then,” Doud recalled. “For some reason, they came to think, ‘When Chuck calls, he’ll at least treat us fairly.’” They may have trusted him because he held different views than most other reporters. Doud was skeptical of some of the evidence against Ted, including the bite marks made on Lisa Levy’s buttocks and nipple during the Chi Omega sorority killings (still a controversial subject). “I don’t think any of those cases would stand up today,” Doud says. And Doud was critical of his peers. He was an editor at the paper and supervised other writers. But after Ted Bundy was arrested in Utah, he was concerned that there had been “no fair coverage” of the case. “From the beginning, the press began to make the case against Ted Bundy,” Doud said. He went to Aspen, Colorado to cover Ted’s first jail escape; when Ted was captured six days later the press was “jumping for joy, and saying, ‘We finally got him,’” Doud explained.