Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (5 page)

As a teenager, Raleigh had worked for Don and their father, logging in northern California. Raleigh had babysat Ann when she was a newborn while they all lived in tents in the summer. When Ann went missing, Raleigh had to borrow a car from the dealership where he worked to make the long, hot drive over the mountains to Tacoma.

“There was a lot of police activity,” Raleigh Burr remembered about the day. “They questioned us—where we were from, who we were. There was coffee on the stove. Don was sitting on a couch with his eyes closed. I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t respond. I didn’t see any hysteria. Some people had brought food, probably Bev’s church friends or high school friends. I was so sure everything would turn out all right; there must be an explanation.”

Other family arrived, too. Jeff Leach was Bev’s nephew, her brother Jerry’s boy. Jeff was exactly Ann’s age. His family often joined the Burrs at Fox Island, where Bev’s father owned two small, rustic cabins. After the phone call that Ann was missing, Jeff’s family immediately left their home in Seattle for Tacoma. Jeff Leach remembers helping put up the posters with Ann’s photo, and the tension and fear in the Burr house. “It terrified me a lot,” he says of his cousin’s disappearance. “We didn’t wander too far.”

After the citizens of Tacoma saw the newspaper stories about Ann Burr, they telephoned the police with tips. Sometimes the calls were about the obvious. Had the police checked the Burr’s attic? Were they
sure?
What about the furnace? Police got calls from a man with a divining rod, offering to help look for Ann. Another said that if he was given a sock of Ann’s, he was sure he could trace her. The police considered them “crackpots” but politely took their names, phone numbers, and addresses and checked to see, first, if they were known sex offenders. Then they followed-up on some of the tips. One caller said Ann was in a Portland area hotel with two men and a woman. Tacoma police asked their colleagues in Portland to check it out. Within a surprisingly short period of time—a couple of hours—Portland police called back and claimed to have contacted dozens of hotels. They said they couldn’t find any record of two men, a woman, and a child registered.

Other residents of Tacoma just appeared at the Burr house wanting to help search. The men found themselves subjected to questioning by police. Criminals, after all, were known to return to the scene of the crime and act like a Good Samaritan, offering to help. The men were taken to police headquarters, questioned about the unusual interest they were taking in the case, and released. Many people in the Burr’s North Tacoma neighborhood reported they had heard or seen prowlers or had found their flower gardens trampled; they could give no details but were usually cooperative when police knocked on their doors, asking to search their homes and basements. The exception was Mrs. S___ of North 13th Street. “Widow, very old, would not let us search house,” Officers Meyer and Burk wrote in their report.

They visited one neighbor, Dorothy H___ , who had arrived home late the night before, the night of the storm, after taking inventory at her bar. As she was doing some wash in the basement, she heard a noise and saw the silhouette of a man’s head very close to a kitchen window. She described him as a large person with bushy hair. She screamed and he ran. She called the police and reported the incident. The police log showed that she had called at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 31, just two hours before Ann was found missing.

Wives called the police to report that their husbands were acting suspiciously and were spending a lot of time under their house for some unknown reason. Mothers gave alibis to unemployed sons who had a record of brushes with the law or had spent time in the insane asylum. Neighbors reported seeing a midget with a beard peeking in windows. Another neighbor regaled the police with stories of how he had first had sex at age six, and had impregnated one girl when he was just nine.

What police call “sightseer traffic” began. Hundreds of cars drove past the Burr house, slowing as if to look at Christmas decorations or the scene of a traffic accident. The address—printed in every story and every edition of the newspaper—was by now familiar. Just as Bev and her friends had bicycled by the Mattson home as children and never failed to remark on it being the site of a famous kidnapping, so strangers wanted to see for themselves where this one had happened and feel grateful it wasn’t them.

In the late afternoon, Tacoma Police Chief Don Hager met with Elgin Olrogg of the Tacoma bureau of the FBI. Later, Agent Olrogg told reporters that he was only observing the case. Police Inspector Smith told reporters that “the girl’s case has not yet been classed as a kidnaping [
sic
] as thus far there are no facts to support such a supposition.”

The FBI observed for days, never putting its experience at kidnappings to use. It released statements explaining that there was no evidence that someone had entered the Burr house, and that it was convinced Ann had probably wandered or run away. Bev called that “absolutely stupid.”

Detectives Zatkovich and Strand agreed. They had no use for the FBI. “We used to have to tell the FBI, ‘You guys get out of our hair and we’ll solve the case, and then we’ll call you,’” Zatkovich once explained. “They would send two carloads of strangers over from Seattle on every bank robbery, and we had to wait until they got out of here to go to work.”

A caption on a photograph of Ann published that week in the
Tacoma News Tribune
bluntly posed this question: “Was Ann Marie the victim of a sex pervert, or was she abducted by someone who wanted a child?” There was no caption or headline that could suggest anything that hadn’t already occurred to Bev and Don. It was easy to imagine the worst.

Very quickly, the rumors began. Bev had been married before and the child’s
real
father had grabbed Ann. Don used to go by another name when he was logging in California. The couple was hiding something. They weren’t really the girl’s parents. They had left their children alone, and see what happens? Bev overheard a woman in a restaurant say, “You know who killed her—the mother.”

Bev and Don were hurt by the rumors. Plus, the police were stepping up their questioning of Don, asking him pointed questions. So Bev and Don talked it over, asked a relative to stay with the children, and appeared at the police station insisting they wanted to take polygraph tests. The police agreed. Bev was nervous; what if the results made them look suspicious? But the test showed that neither was involved in Ann’s disappearance. Bev made sure the newspapers reported it.

Don couldn’t just sit in the house and wait. He and Raleigh and their eldest brother Barney took a walk in the neighborhood. They were searching for Ann, of course. Raleigh was pleasantly startled when he heard a voice say, “Hi, Uncle Raleigh.” He turned around excitedly. “I thought it was Ann, but it was Greg,” he remembered. The three bothers walked up to the construction sites at the college. When they returned from their walk they made a suggestion to the police that was entered in that day’s police report: “Mr. Burr and a couple of his relatives went for a walk this evening, and when they returned said there are several excavation holes in the UPC [
sic
] area which are full of water several feet deep. Possibly the Public Works Department can be contacted today to pump out those holes in case the missing girl could have fallen in.” They were the same deep ditches where Don had seen the young man with the smirk that morning, kicking dirt back and forth with his foot as he watched the search for Ann. Many years later, when another Tacoma child became famous, Don was certain he recognized the face.

This is Ann Marie Burr …
Don swore that’s what he heard. But the police, who were nearby and monitoring the calls, were quite certain that the girl did not say her full name. They would never know for certain because the recording machine malfunctioned, and the call was not recorded. But Don believed it was his daughter’s voice.
Eight minutes later the phone rang again. This time

There was a brief pause, and then the caller hung up. This call was not recorded either. Were they prank calls? Ann never referred to herself as Ann Marie. But maybe a kidnapper had ordered her to say her name, and he thought she was called ‘Ann Marie.’ Wouldn’t a kidnapped child scream for their parent rather than recite their full name?

When the horrible day came to an end, Bev put the children to bed. It was just like the evening before, but nothing like the evening before. Don put Ann’s cocker spaniel Barney on the landing. Detectives stayed in the basement in case the Burrs received a phone call from the kidnapper. Outside, unmarked police cars watched the house. They also watched the house of Mr. D___ , the exhibitionist that the police thought liked children and pregnant women a little too much.

Detectives Zatkovich and Strand wrote in their report that night that… “…extensive questioning of the parents failed to shed any light on the girl’s disappearance. Both of them claim that she is an intelligent girl, although quiet; that she has good habits, obeys her parents, goes to bed early, sleeps well; however, she does read occasionally in the evening in bed and, to their knowledge, she has no problem of walking in her sleep or anything of that nature.”

And then, for the first of hundreds of evenings to come, Detectives Tony Zatkovich and Ted Strand sat in Tony’s driveway in their white Chevy, the car they hoped wouldn’t give them away as cops, lit cigarette after cigarette, and talked about how an eight-year-old girl could vanish. Zatkovich wasn’t so sure about Don. He thought he was a little shady, an odd duck, stern. And there were those calls that were made to the wrong Burr house, threatening “the matinee lover.” Strand agreed with his partner that the kidnapper must know Ann, must know the layout of the house, and must have coaxed her outside. At some point they made a bargain to quit smoking. Zatkovich did quit; Strand lasted a few days, then went back to his Camels.

The Burr house was filled with relatives staying the night. Julie, Greg, and Mary were confused and scared. Julie, just seven, was suddenly the eldest of the children, a responsibility that would weigh on her. Ann wasn’t just Julie’s older sister—she was her best friend.

“I remember being terrified to go upstairs to bed alone,” Julie recalled, “and to get from there to the safety of the main floor where my parents were. I couldn’t stay in the room Ann and I had shared for years, so I moved to an empty room on the other side of the house upstairs, and Mary moved into our room.”

Bev tried to reassure her children. “They needed me very much, and I had to remember that. They were terrified. They asked, ‘Will he come and get us, too?’”

TED HELD HIS nose. Tacoma stunk. He had always thought it stunk. He noticed it as soon as they arrived in the city, after his mother cruelly yanked him from his grandfather’s house—the only home and the only fatherfigure he had known—and brought him to this city that smelled. The smell’s origin was tidal flats, sulfur emissions from paper mills, and 100 years of chemicals dumped into Commencement Bay, creating one of the most polluted bodies of water in the country. The stink even had a name: the Tacoma Aroma. You tried to get out of its way when the wind was from the east.

Ted was embarrassed by his family’s descent into working-class status and especially by the Nash Rambler his mother and step-father drove. Ted fantasized about being adopted by western actor Roy Rogers (
he
wouldn’t drive a Nash Rambler). There would be money, and Ted would have his own horse.

The boy admired his great-uncle John Cowell, whom he and Louise stayed with when they first arrived in Tacoma. John Cowell was as different from his older brother, Samuel, as he could be (except they both married women named Eleanor, which was also their mother’s name). Samuel, Ted’s grandfather, was the oldest of seven children; John was the youngest. Twenty-three years and a world of differences separated them.

John Cowell was a music professor at the University of Puget Sound. While living in his home, Ted was introduced to the culture and status he longed for and thought he deserved. But he was just a temporary visitor and had to watch his cousin, a boy just a few months older than he was, thrive in the home Ted thought he should have. If Roy Rogers didn’t adopt him, maybe his great-uncle could.

Cowell drove exotic European cars, which turned heads in Tacoma. After living and performing in Europe, he had a French Simca shipped home, and later he drove a Peugeot. “I know he was enamored of our family, he romanticized it,” Ted’s cousin Edna Cowell Martin said. There was a lot to romanticize. Her father wasn’t just a music teacher; he was a noted composer and performer. He’d been a piano prodigy at age six, won a scholarship to The Juilliard School as a teenager, been a student of Aaron Copland’s at Tanglewood, earned his graduate degree at the Yale School of Music, performed at Carnegie Hall, and was friends with Leonard Bernstein.

In addition to riding in a Simca and a Peugeot, Edna and her older brother John (the cousin Ted envied), went to private schools in Europe and Seattle. The Cowells had a beach house near Longbranch, on a peninsula west of Tacoma. Edna remembers the Bundy family arriving for a visit, all crowded into the Nash Rambler.

The Cowells were educated, well-traveled, and classy, but they weren’t wealthy. When Louise and Teddy arrived in Tacoma in 1951, the Cowells were living in a modest house on Alder, just two blocks from 3009 North 14th, where Don and Bev Burr moved their growing family in 1955. By then, Ted and his mother, step-father, and Ted’s young half-siblings were living on South Sheridan, still in North Tacoma. Later they moved to N. Skyline Drive, not far from the suspension bridge across Puget Sound connecting Tacoma to the Kitsap Peninsula. The Cowells, meanwhile, had moved to N. Puget Sound Avenue, still near the university, and Ted would ride his bicycle back and forth. Despite Ted’s jealousy, he and his cousin John Jr. were good friends. But by the time he was a young teenager, Ted was spending a lot of time alone. He liked to roam on his bike. He liked alleys, and there were alleys everywhere in his former neighborhood in North Tacoma.