The Stranger Beside Me

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

Ann Rule

ANN RULE'S GRIPPING TRUE-LIFE STORIES OF PASSION AND MURDER . . . D LUST KILLER. One of the most terrifying true-crime stories of our time ... One by one the young women vanished. Pretty Linda Slawson disappeared while selling encyclopedias door to door. College girl Jan Whitney never completed her two-hour drive home ... Updated with shocking new material about the monstrous murderer. (154770-$4.95)

D POSSESSION. In a savage wilderness, a psychopathic killer sets out to make a woman his sexual slave ... Joanne Lindstrom was a beautiful young wife on a camping trip with her husband in the Northwest when Duane entered their lives. Then her husband was gone and the only man in her life was this stranger who demanded total possession. (128966-$4.95)

D THE WANT-AD KILLER. The terrifying true tale of a master manipulator of women. Brilliant and warped, he mocked the law in his orgy of savage sex and slaughter from Alaska to Washington State to Minnesota. (142039-$3.50)

D THE STRANGER BESIDE ME. Working on the biggest story of her life, journalist Anne Rule didn't know that Ted Bundy, her friend and co-worker at a psychological counseling hotline, was the slayer she was hunting. Today Bundy is in prison, convicted of mass sexual abuse and murder; here Rule tells the shocking story of this "allAmerican boy" turned killer. (137116-$4.50) *Prices slightly higher in Canada. Buy them at your local bookstore or use this convenient coupon for ordering. ,

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Copyright © 1980 by Anne Rule Afterword copyright © 1986 by Anne Rule. All rights reserved. For information address

W. W. Norton and Company, Inc

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published by W. W. Norton and Company, Inc

The hardcover edition was published simultaneously in Canada by George J. McLeod Limited, Toronto

,

First Signet Printing, July, 1981

14 15 16

Printed in the U. S. A.

For legal reasons, some of the names in this book have been changed.

This book is dedicated to my parents:

Sophie Hansen Stackhouse and

the late Chester R. Stackhouse ...

for their unfailing love and support,

and because they always believed.. . «

Acknowledgment

I have been fortunate indeed to have had the support of many individuals and organizations in writing this book. Without their help and emotional backing, it would have been impossible, and I would like to thank them: The Committee of Friends and Families of Victims of Violent Crimes and Missing Persons; the Seattle Police Department Crimes Against Persons Unit; the King County Police Department Major Crimes Unit; former Sheriff Don Redmond of Thurston County; Lieutenant James Stovall of the Salem, Oregon Police Department; Gene Miller of the Miami Herald; George Thurston of the Washington Post; Tony Polk of the Rocky Mountain News; Rick Barry of the Tampa Tribune; Albert Govoni, editor of True Detective; Jack Olsen; Yvonne E.W. Smith; Amelia Mills; Maureen and Bill Woodcock; Dr. Peter J. Modde, and my children, Laura, Leslie, Andy and Mike, who gave up months of their mother's companionship so that I might write.

And tortures him now more, the more he sees Of pleasure not for him ordained: then soon Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites:

"Thoughts, whither have ye led me? with what sweet Compulsion thus transported to forget

What hither brought us? hate, not love, nor hope

Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste

Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,

Save what is in destroying; other joy

To me is lost...."

Paradise Lost: Book IX (Lines 469-79)

Preface

I

This book began a half dozen years ago as an entirely different work. It was to have been a crime reporter's chronicling of a series of inexplicable murders of beautiful young women. By its very nature, it was to have been detached, the result of extensive research. My life, certainly, would be no part of it. It has evolved instead into an intensely personal book, the story of a unique friendship that has somehow transcended the facts that my research produced. As the years passed, I learned that the stranger at the very vortex of an ever-spreading police probe was not a stranger at all; he was my friend. To write a book about an anonymous murder suspect is one thing. To write such a book about someone you have known and cared for for ten years is quite another. And yet, that is exactly what has happened. My contract to write this book was signed many months before Ted Bundy became the prime suspect in more than a dozen homicide cases. My book would not be about a faceless name hi a newspaper, about one unknown out of the over one million people who live in the Seattle area; it would be about my friend, Ted Bundy.

We might never have met at all. Logically, statistically, demographically, the chance that Ted Bundy and I should meet and become fast friends is almost too obscure to contemplate. We have lived in the same states at the same timenot once but many times-but the fifteen years between our ages precluded our meeting for many years. When we did meet in 1971, I was a plumpish mother of four, almost forty, nearing divorce. Ted was twenty-four, a brilliant, handsome senior in psychology at the University of Washington. Chanfce made us partners on the crisis lines at Seattle's Crisis Clinic on the Tuesday night late shift. Rapport, an almost instant rapport, made us friends. I was a volunteer on the phones, and Ted earned two dollars an hour as a work-study student. He looked forward to

XIV

law school, and I hoped that my fledgling career as a freelance writer might grow into something that would provide a fulltime income for my family. Although I had a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Washington, I had done little writing until 1968 when I'd become the Northwest correspondent for True Detective Magazine and her sister publications, all specializing in fact-detective stories. My beat was major crime stories in a territory extending from Eugene, Oregon to the Canadian border.

It proved to be a field for which I was well suited. I'd been a Seattle policewoman in the 1950s and the combination of my interest in law enforcement and my education in writing worked. I had minored in abnormal psychology at the University and had gone on to obtain an associate degree in police science to enable me to write with some expertise about the advances in scientific criminal investigation. By 1980,1 would have covered more than 800 cases, principally homicides, all up and down the Northwestern coast, gaining the trust of hundreds of homicide detectives-one of whom would give me the somewhat unsettling accolade,

"Ann, you're just like one of the boys." I'm sure that our mutual interest in the law drew Ted and me together, gave us some common ground for discussion--just as our interest in abnormal psychology did. But there has always seemed to be something more, something almost ephemeral. Ted himself referred to it once in a letter mailed from a jail cell, one of the many cells he would occupy.

"You've called it Karma. It may be. Yet whatever supernatural force guides our destinies, it has brought us together in some mind-expanding situations. I must believe this invisible hand will pour more chilled Chablis for us in less treacherous, more tranquil times to come. Love, ted."

The letter was dated March 6, 1976, and we were never to come face to face again outside prison walls or a tightly secured courtroom. But a curious bond remains.

And so Ted Bundy was my friend, through all the good times and the bad tunes. I stuck by him for-many years, hoping that none of the innuendo was true. There are few who will understand my decision. I'm sure that it will anger many. And, with it all, Ted Bundy's story must be told, and it must be told in its entirety if any good can evolve from the terrible years: 1974-1980.

I have labored for a long time with my ambivalence about

XV

Ted. As a professional writer, I have been handed the story of a lifetime, a story any author prays for. Prohably there is no other writer so privy to every facet of Ted's story. I did not seek it out, and there have been many, many, long nights when I wished devoutly that things might have been different -that I was writing about a complete stranger whose hopes and dreams were no part of my own. I have wanted to go back to 1971, to erase all that has happened, to be able to think of Ted as the open, smiling young man I knew then.

Ted knows I am writing this book. He has always known, and he has continued to write to me, to call me. I suspect that he knows I will try to show the whole man.

Ted has been described as the perfect son, the perfect student, the Boy Scout grown to adulthood, a genius, as handsome as a movie idol, a bright light in the future of the Republican Party, a sensitive psychiatric social worker, a budding lawyer, a trusted friend, a young man for whom the future could surely hold only success. He is all of these things, and none of them. Ted Bundy fits no pattern at all; you could not look at his record and say: "See, it was inevitable that he would turn out like this." In fact, it was incomprehensible.

January 29,1980

2 THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

University of Michigan campus, and he could have stayed there. There'd been enough money left from the stash he'd hidden in jail to pay for a twelve-dollar room at the YMCA but Michigan nights in January can be unrelentingly icy, and he didn't have warm clothing. He'd been to Florida before. Back in the days when he was an energetic young worker for the Republican Party he'd received a trip to the 1968

convention in Miami as part of his reward. But, as he pored over college catalogues in the University of Michigan Library, he wasn't thinking of Miami.

He looked at the University of Florida in Gainesville and dismissed it summarily. There was no water around Gainesville, and, as he would say later, "It didn't look right on the map--superstition, I guess." Tallahassee, on the other hand, "looked great." He had lived the better part of his life on Washington's Puget Sound and he craved the sight and smell of water: Tallahassee was on the Ochlockonee River which led to the Apalachee Bay and the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico. He knew he couldn't go home again, ever, but the Florida Indian names reminded him a little of the cities and rivers of Washington with their Northwestern tribal names.

Tallahassee it would be.

He had traveled comfortably up until New Year's Day. The first night out was a little hard, but walking free was enough in itself. When he'd stolen the "beater" off the streets in Glenwood Springs, he'd known it might not be up to making the snow-clogged pass into Aspen, but he'd had little choice. It had burned out thirty miles from Vail-forty miles from Aspen-but a good Samaritan had helped him push the car off the road, and given him a ride back to Vail.

From there, there was the bus ride to Denver, a cab to the airport, and a plane to Chicago, even before they'd discovered he was gone. He hadn't been on a train since he was a child and he'd enjoyed the Amtrak journey to Ann Arbor, having his first drinks in two years in the club car as he thought of his captors searching the snowbanks further and further behind him.

In Ann Arbor, he'd counted his money and realized that he would have to conserve it. He'd been straight since leaving Colorado, but he decided one more car theft didn't matter. He left this one in the middle of a black ghetto in Atlanta with the keys in it. Nobody could ever tie it to Ted Bundy-THE STRANGER BESIDE ME 3

not even the FBI (an organization that he privately considered vastly overrated,) who had just placed him on their Ten-Most-Wanted List. The Trailways bus had delivered him right into the center of downtown Tallahassee. He'd had a bit of a scare as he got off the bus. He thought he'd seen a man he'd known in prison in Utah, but the man had looked right through him, and he realized he was slightly paranoid. Besides, he didn't have enough money to travel any further and still afford a room to rent.

He loved Tallahassee. It was perfect, dead, quiet-a hick town on Sunday morning. He walked out onto Duval Street, and it was glorious. Warm. The air smelled good and it seemed right that it was the fresh dawn of a new day. Like a homing pigeon, he headed for the Florida State University campus. It wasn't that hard to find. Duval cut across College and he turned right. He could see the old and new capitol buildings ahead, and, beyond that, the campus itself.