Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (23 page)

In fact, Doud played a part in Ted’s nearly-successful plea deal. Carole Boone had brought some of Ted’s attorneys to Tacoma to meet with his family so they could encourage him to plead guilty to second-degree murder in the two Chi Omega cases and for the murder of Kimberly Leach. If he had, he would have avoided execution. “The plea was worked out in my living room,” Doud recalled. But Ted turned it down. According to Ann Rule, there were rumors about Ted’s “almost” guilty plea, but it was never reported in the press.

Doud still has questions about the extent of Ted’s crimes. “Ted Bundy was a thief, a liar, a small-time crook, but did he kill all those people? I have huge doubts,” Doud said. “He was a crook, not a saint. He may have killed someone.”

A few minutes before 11 p.m. on January 23, 1989, the call came that his parents had been waiting for. When the telephone rang, Louise moved into to the dining room and Russ Carmack followed her. He had his Leica with him, an exceptionally quiet camera. He leaned against a wall and listened to her conversation with Ted. “She kept looking down,” Carmack said. He took only a few photos, not wanting to intrude on the scene. He remembers the house was “dark and moody, like the event.” Johnnie, his eyes red, spoke briefly to Ted and paced the floor, calling Ted “son.”

“We just want you to know how much we love you and always will,” his mother told Ted. Doud wrote that Louise’s voice “quivered with emotion” as she spoke with him. Prison authorities had allowed 10 minutes for the call. As she listened to Ted, his mother was writing down messages from him for friends and family. At one point, Louise said into the phone, “Chuck Doud is here. Do you want to talk to him?” and she handed the phone to Doud. “[Ted] said, ‘Well, I guess I made a few mistakes,’” Doud remembered. Doud told Ted, “Your mom is a tower of strength.” Then Doud told Ted his prayers were with him, and handed the phone back to Louise.

In the iconic photograph, Louise is holding the telephone in her left hand and in her right hand is a white pencil. “People always thought it was a cigarette, but it wasn’t,” Carmack said. “It was exhausting, my heart was racing. I fired off three frames. She finally said goodbye.” It was Carmack who heard her say her final words to Ted; he shared them with Doud: “You’ll always be my precious son.”

“He sounds wonderful,” Louise said to the others when the call ended. “He sounds very much at peace with himself. He said, ‘I’m sorry I’ve given you all such grief…but a part of me was hidden.’”

Then the phone rang again. One of Ted’s sisters had refused to take his phone call, so he was permitted to call his mother again. The photo of Louise Bundy in the foreground, alone at her dining room table speaking to her son, was taken during the first call. “She was wiping tears from her eyes. She whispered goodbye,” Carmack remembered.

Carmack had a long career as a photo journalist. The assignment that night was the hardest. The father of four, Carmack said he offered his condolences as he left the house. Carmack’s photo was sent around the world by the Associated Press, but first he had to get it back to the
News Tribune
offices. “They literally stopped the presses to wait for my photo,” he said.

Ted was offered a traditional last meal of steak, eggs, hash browns, orange juice, and coffee after turning down an offer to choose his last meal. His head was shaved. He changed into clean prison-issued shirt and pants.

Theodore Robert Bundy, age 42, was executed by electrocution on January 24, 1989 for the murder of 12-yearold Kimberly Diane Leach.

Time of death was 7:16 a.m. It took about 60 seconds for him to die. The scene outside the prison was described as a “carnival atmosphere.” Hundreds of people held signs reading “Fry, Bundy, Fry, Thank God It’s Fry-Day,” and clapped, cheered, sang, and set off fireworks when prison officials announced his death. Within an hour, the body was transported 23 miles to a funeral home in Gainesville.

WITHIN DAYS OF his death, photos of a dead Ted— authenticated by the medical examiner—were published in the supermarket tabloid
Weekly World News.
“We’ve been selling them like crazy today,” a sales clerk at Dawn’s News & Smoke Shop, in Lake Worth, Florida said of the brisk sales.

A director at the Williams-Thomas Funeral Home in Gainesville, where Ted’s body had been taken, turned down thousands of dollars in bribes from photographers.
Someone
took a picture or leaked the coroner’s photo. There Ted is, his head shaved, with burn marks on his skull from the electrode that had sent two thousand volts of electricity to his brain. An incision runs around the top of his head, from ear to ear, the cut the medical examiner made during the autopsy.

While people in the east were buying up the published photo, sentiment in the west was running against allowing Ted’s ashes to be scattered in the Cascade Mountains. Callers to a Seattle radio show suggested other places the ashes could be disposed of, including a sewer or down a toilet. Authorities said there was no federal or state law preventing the dispersing of a serial killer’s ashes anywhere he wanted.

Two weeks after Ted’s execution, Louise Bundy gave her most extensive interview ever, to
Vanity Fair
writer Myra MacPherson. Standing in the dining room where Russ Carmack photographed her saying goodbye to her son, Louise pointed out the 400 condolence cards piled on the dining room table. Some were simply addressed to: Louise Bundy, Ted’s Mother, Tacoma, Washington.
Vanity Fair
photographed Louise embracing Ted’s Scout uniform.

Referring to Ted’s crimes as “those terrible things,” Louise broke her silence about her parents and talked about the environment Ted spent his first years in, revealing that her father had beaten her mother “once in a while.” She also admitted to ambivalent feelings about keeping Ted and not putting him up for adoption. And then Louise served MacPherson apple pie.

Life was never normal for Bev and Don, or Louise and Johnnie, but it did return to a routine after Ted was executed. Johnnie continued to work as a cook at the military hospital near Tacoma, and Louise spent years working on the University of Puget Sound campus, where she was well-liked and staff and faculty were fiercely protective of her. They had always lived modestly, and it couldn’t have been easy for them to bail Ted out of jail more than once, or to travel and be present when he stood trial.

Don relented and Bev finally got out of the house and had the chance to take writing classes. She worked as a secretary at Bates Technical College and St. Joseph’s Hospital, and as a volunteer she taught reading at a local school. Don continued his job at the National Guard base.

Whether planned or coincidental, Bev and Don would often be out of the country in August. They traveled to China, Russia, Iceland, Germany, Canada, Arizona, Cape Cod, the Panama Canal, California, Patagonia, Bermuda, Nova Scotia, and across Asia. They even ran into the Bundy’s. Their paths didn’t cross often in Tacoma, but they did on a 20-day bus tour of the Ozarks. “There we were, alphabetically, Bundy, Burr,” Bev remembered. “Twenty days looking at them!” The two couples didn’t speak and seem to have stayed out of each other’s photographs.

With the instincts of a journalist, Bev kept a journal of every trip, typing up her notes after she returned home and filling dozens of albums with her observations as well as photographs. If she had a dream about Ann, she recorded it. If she lit a candle for Mary in a church in France, she wrote of it. Both she and Don looked at faces when they traveled, looking for someone who seemed familiar, maybe a little girl grown up. Ann’s disappearance was never far from Bev’s thoughts. An album of a foreign trip or of a daughter’s wedding back home would conclude with newspaper clippings about Ann, updates on Ted in prison, or a yellowing copy of the missing poster. Bev had followed the stories when college-aged girls began disappearing from campuses, and when four-year-old Heidi Peterson disappeared from her front yard in Seattle during the same period.

Bev’s closest friends and her relatives said she didn’t talk about Ann. Yvonne Doherty and husband traveled with Bev and Don to Yugoslavia, and on cruises to the Caribbean and South China Sea. They met regularly with other friends for potlucks. “We were very, very good acquaintances for many decades,” Doherty said. “But we didn’t talk a lot about marital problems, men you wished you had married, or even missing children. None of us wanted to push the issue. A lot of our generation don’t talk about these things.”

Don’s jealousy of Bev and need for control went with them, wherever they traveled. If she dared speak to any man, even a tour guide or a baggage handler, he would berate Bev for hours. When they were stranded in Russia, and once when their luggage was lost in Egypt, Don nagged at her for hours after she tried to help. In photographs of trips or holidays at home, there is no affection between them. “I never did see them hold hands,” said Doherty. Raleigh Burr said he “never saw unbridled laughter, joy, mirth” between Bev and his brother.

Bev’s mother, Marie, seemed to begrudge Bev’s freedom to travel. She would ask her daughter, “What if I die when you’re gone?” Bev would reply, “That would be too bad.”

The Burrs often hosted gatherings but there was a manic quality to Bev’s entertaining. Parties and holidays had to be kept light. There were games, songs, more games. At the same time Bev was “putting herself in harm’s way,” according to Raleigh Burr. Bev was injured in a series of accidents: she stepped on gardening shears and her shoe filled up with blood; she fell in the yard; she burned her arm. Were they self-inflicted? Dr. Conte said Bev was “acting out.” “She may have felt that she doesn’t deserve to be loved,” Raleigh said. “She was difficult to be around— anxious, constant anxiety, she was protective of Mary,” said her sister-in-law, Bonnie Taschler.

At one point, Bev was hospitalized. Julie visited her, but never knew if her mother had tried to harm herself or had experienced a breakdown. Bev told Julie that she “needed a rest.” And then Bev decided she wanted to become a nun. Bev talked to her parish about the possibility of going into a convent. They discouraged her. “We were teens,” Julie remembered. “It felt very confusing to know our mom wanted to leave us and become a nun. Poor mom.”

In a few years, Laura would witness her mother shoplifting. A counselor told Bev she was taking things because something had been taken from her.

It began with the outburst Raleigh Burr remembers. By age 12, Mary was angry, sullen, and remote, and it worsened. At first her parents thought it was just teenage behavior. Mary was sleeping a lot and stopped going to school. The school told Bev that when Mary did attend, she created a “disturbance” in class. Despite the problems in their marriage, Bev and Don were united when it came to helping their daughter. Yet, Don must have secondguessed Bev when Mary was first ill. In a short story for her community college writing class, Bev wrote about a family with a schizophrenic daughter. The husband (named Frank) criticizes his wife (Eva) because he believes the girl isn’t sick; he says she is spoiled. Even Eva’s son tells her she is “too nice” to his sister, that she needs to “get tough.” The daughter in the story, named Mary, has stopped eating, going to school, and bathing, and has been cutting herself out of family photos. For a while, Eva is in denial, convinced that Mary only suffers from some kind of nutritional deficiency:

“Frank said she was defying me again, acting like a real smartie. He thought I knew how to handle an eighteen-year-old. After all, he said, I had been a schoolteacher, spent lots of money to learn those things. He claimed he didn’t have nearly the trouble with her I did.

Mary and I walked toward the car. Maple trees were budding in the front yard, [the] warm sunshine was comforting. If Mary had a vitamin deficiency affecting her nerves, Dr. Kenney could remedy the situation quickly.”

In the story, the psychiatrist admits Mary to a hospital and orders the family not to have any contact with her. “My God, she’s got him fooled, too,” Frank says of the compassion the doctor shows to Mary.

But it wasn’t until after Mary—the real Mary—started a fire that burned a part of the house on North 20th Street and told Bev that the devil had told her to stop going to school, that Bev looked for help. She found it in Dr. William Conte, a psychiatrist in Tacoma who had once been director of the Department of Institutions for the state of Washington, including its maximum security prison at Walla Walla. Considered a “liberal social psychiatrist,” Conte instituted prison reforms, culminating in what the
New York Times
called “perhaps the strangest” prison social structure in the U.S. It was the first time guards and convicts were called “corrections officers” and “residents.” Inmates could grow beards, there were no uniforms, and guards were encouraged to “take a lifer home for dinner.” Conte resigned in June, 1971, as the experiment began to go bad. The residents had wrested too much control; gang activity increased and inmates threatened to stage sit-downs or even take hostages if they didn’t get their way. Gary Ridgway (Ted’s “Riverman”) is incarcerated at Walla Walla, but the lifers don’t get to go out for dinner anymore.

By the time Bev sought him out, Conte had returned to private practice in Tacoma. Conte diagnosed Mary as paranoid schizophrenic. Oddly, Conte didn’t tell Bev and Don directly of his diagnosis; he wrote it on a piece of paper and sealed it in an envelope, then handed it to Bev. In that pre-computer age, she was to take it to the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services herself, where the staff would help the family navigate Mary’s care, including institutionalization. Naturally, Bev opened the envelope. In the short story, Eva does the same thing. Later, she asks the psychiatrist why he didn’t share his diagnosis with the parents. The doctor tells her, “Because none of us at the hospital knew enough about it to be encouraging or discouraging.” Dr. Conte told Bev he didn’t want Mary to have to carry a “label” of schizophrenia.