The Stranger Beside Me (16 page)

Ted's attitude at the Department of Emergency Services drew mixed reviews from his fellow workers. Some of them

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liked him; others thought he was gold-bricking. His work was erratic. It was not unusual for him to work through the night on fuel allocation projects, but he also often arrived for work very late in the morning. If he missed a day's work, he never bothered to call in to inform his supervisors he would be out; he would simply appear the next day saying he'd been ill.

Ted did sign up for the office softball team, and went to parties given by fellow workers. Carole Ann Boone Anderson, Alice Thissen, and Joe McLean liked Ted very much. Some of his other co-.workers deemed him something of a con man, a manipulator, and a man who talked as if he worked hard, but who actually produced little.

Ted's longest absence from the job, according to Neil Miller, administrative officer for the D.E.S. office, had been between Thursday, July llth and Wednesday, July 17th. This time, he had phoned in to say he was sick, but Miller cannot recall what his illness was. Ted had sick pay accumulated to cover the first day, but lost three days' pay. Ted had taken a lot of kidding after the double disappearances at Lake Sammamish on July 14th, and the avalanche of publicity about the mysterious "Ted" which followed. Carole Ann Boone Anderson razzed him unmercifully about it, although they were great friends and Ted had been very considerate with her as she debated ending a relationship with a man she'd been seeing.

The head of the Search and Rescue group for Washington State also teased Ted about his being a "look-alike" for the "Ted" the police were looking for.

But nobody meant it seriously.

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In all, there would be four individuals who would suggest the name "Ted Bundy" to the homicide probers. At about the same time I had had Dick Reed check on whether Ted drove a car-possibly a Volkswagen-a professor from the University of Washington, and a woman employed at the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia had called the King County Police to say that Ted Bundy resembled the artist's depiction of the man seen at Lake Sammamish on July 14th. Just as I had, each of them noted that there was nothing about Ted's personality or activities that would make him a suspect; it was just similarity in appearance and the name "Ted." Meg Anders had studied the drawing that appeared in so many papers and on the nightly television news broadcasts. She saw the resemblance too, and-just as I had-she put it out of her mind at first. For me, it had been vaguely disturbing; for Meg, it could mean the end of all her dreams. Meg had only one close friend other than Ted, a woman. That was Lynn Banks, the woman she had grown up with in Utah, the woman who had moved to Seattle about the same time Meg had. Lynn would not let Meg forget the picture of the man the police sought, even though Meg tried to ignore it. She thrust a newspaper in front of Meg's eyes and demanded, "Who does this look like? It's someone we know, isn't it?" Meg looked away. "It does look like him, doesn't it? Very much . . ." Lynn didn't like Ted. She had felt that his treatment of Meg was cavalier, that he was not dependable. More than that, she distrusted him. She had come upon him once, late at night, as he crept through the backyard of the house where she lived, and he hadn't had a good explanation for being there. Now, she insisted that Meg go to the police and tell 104

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them how much Ted Bundy looked like the composite picture.

"No," Meg said firmly. "I can't do that, and I don't want to talk about it anymore."

Meg Anders could not really believe that her Ted could be the Ted the police wanted. She stiil loved him so much, despite the way he had changed during the summer of 1974. She blocked all of Lynn's arguments. She didn't want to think about it.

Meg still had no knowledge of Ted's "engacement" to Stephanie Brooks the previous winter, had no idea how close she had come to losing him. She was concerned about the things she did know about. She and Ted were about to be separated, physically-if not emotionally-by the miles between Seattle and Salt Lake City. He planned to leave on Labor Day for law school. She had wanted him to go to Utah for his law education, hut she dreaded the years ahead without him. There would be visits, of course, but it wouldn't be the same.

Ted had begun to pack up his belongings, cleaning out the room where he'd lived for almost five years. He packed up the raft hanging over his bed, the raft that had often startled the women he brought home, his plants, the bicycle wheel that hung by chains and a meat hook from the ceiling, records, books, clothes. He had an old wh'te pickup truck he could move with, and he would haul the VW bug behind it. Ted had become sexually cold to Meg during the summer, blaming his lack of interest in sex on job pressures and what he called "too high a peak of frustration." Meg had been hurt and confused; she was convinced that there were other women who were fulfilling his sexual drives in the way she once had.

Meg threw a small going away party for Ted, and she'd expected that they would make love afterward. But they'did not, and Ted left her with only a kiss.

It was not a happy parting. Meg decided that when Ted returned to Seat1|e in a few weeks to sell his car so that he could repay Freda Rogers $500

he owed her, she would tell him that she wmnted to break off their relationship. It didn't look like there was going to be a marriage; it didn't seem to her that they even had a relationship any longer. She was going through the same conflicting emotions that Stephanie Brooks had the January before.

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And yet Meg still loved him. She had loved him for so long. Driving the pickup with the VW trailing behind, Ted set off for Salt Lake City on the Labor Day weekend. I thought of Ted only once during the fall of 1974. In cleaning out some old files, I came across the Christmas card he'd sent me two years before. I read the front, and then, suddenly, something struck me. There had been so much stress placed on the fact that all the missing women had had beautiful long hair. I looked at the card in my hand, "She cut her long hair to buy her lover a watch chain. He sold his watch to buy her combs for her hair." No, that was really embroidering on my imagination. It was simply a nice card, something Ted had undoubtedly picked out at random. The mention of long hair was a coincidence.

Nothing had come of my giving Ted's name to Dick Reed. If Ted had become a suspect, I would have been told. Obviously, my fears had been needless. I thought about throwing the card away, but I kept it, tucking it in with a bunch of old letters. I doubted that I would ever see Ted again. Early in August of that uncharacteristically hot summer of 1974, a King County road worker had paused on a service road two miles east of Lake Sammamish State Park to eat his lunch. As he unwrapped a sandwich, his appetite vanished when his nostrils were assailed with a carrionlike odor. He'd glanced down the brush-strewn bank beside the road, looking for the source of the smell and seen what he took to be a deer carcass discarded by a poacher.

The man had walked back to his truck and moved to a more pleasant spot. He'd quickly forgotten the incident, but he remembered it when he picked up a newspaper on September 8th.

It is now a matter of academic conjecture whether an earlier report by that road worker would have helped detectives. It might well have been vital to the investigation, because that witness had seen not a deer carcass, but a human body, a complete human body, and the grouse hunters who crashed through the brush in the same region a month later stumbled across only bones.

Elzie Hammons, a Seattle construction worker, found the

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scattered remains on September 6th: a lower jaw, a rib cage, a spinal column.

Finally, tragically, the first solid evidence in any of the eight missing girls' disappearances had surfaced, eight months after Lynda Healy had vanished. Hammons knew instinctively what he had found, and he raced into Issaquah to find a phone.

Immediately, King County police deputies and detectives responded, and the area was cordoned off. Reporters chafed at the restriction, and cameramen tried to get something they could show on the evening news. The public was clamoring for news of the find and very little was being released.

Captain Nick Mackie, Sergeant Len Randall and their six detectives, dressed in coveralls, moved past the ropes often, carrying the bits of bone found among the sword fern and brush in over thirty locations. For four days, they worked in daylight and under powerful kleig lights as the sun set.

Coyotes had done their work well; in the end, the detectives, the two hundred Explorer Scouts, deputies, and tracking dogs had literally sifted the earth and drying ground cover in a 300-foot circle, and yet they found so little. The burning heat of July and August had accelerated decomposition, and the foraging animals had reduced the bodies to skulls and bare bones.

There were eight tufts of hair, some of it still long swatches of luxuriant dark brown, some of it blondish-red. There was one skull, the rib cage, the spinal column, a lower mandible (jaw) of another skull, numerous small bones, but there were five femur (thigh) bones. There was no clothing, no jewelry, no bicycle parts, no backpack; the bodies tossed there so carelessly had been naked, and none of the victims' possessions accompanied them.

Now the grim task of identifying the remains began. Dr. Daris Swindler (no relation to Herb Swindler), a physical anthropologist from the University of Washington, studied the femur bones. Dental charts from all the missing women were compared to the. skull and the lower mandible. Hair samples gleaned from the brushes the women had left behind were compared microscopically to the tufts found near Issaquah. Captain Nick Mackie called a press conference, and the dark circles under his eyes, his tired voice, were indicative of the strain he was under. "The worst we feared is true," he an-108

nounced. "We have identified the remains of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund. They were found approximately 1.9 miles from Lake Sammamish State Park where they vanished on July 14th."

He did not speak of Dr. Swindler's other findings, of the anthropologist's feeling that perhaps the femur bones had come from not two, but three or four different bodies. If there had been more skulls lying there among the alder saplings and ferns, they were gone, carried off by animals.

Who were the other two girls who had been brought there?

It was impossible to tell. It wasn't even possible to identify the sex of those thigh bones. All Dr. Swindler could determine was that they were the thigh bones of persons "under thirty," and probably between five feet and five feet five inches tall.

A search for whatever bones might remain on the hillside was hampered by the fact that the slope is crisscrossed with coal mines and shafts, left when mining in the area was suspended in 1949. Many of those mines are filled with water, and far too dangerous to even attempt to search. Mines toward the top of the hill were searched and nothing was found. Memorial services were held for Denise and Janice, and the search for their killer went on.

Winter comes early to the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, and by late October, the region was blanketed with snow. If the land there had more secrets to give up, there was nothing to do but wait until spring thawing.

In the meantime, a task force of top detectives from both the Seattle Police Department and the King County Police Department, set up headquarters in a windowless room hidden between the first and second floors in the county courthouse. There, the walls were covered with maps of Lake Sammamish, the University District, flyers bearing the missing girls' pictures, and composite drawings of "Ted." The phone jangled continually. Thousands of names, thousands of tips; somewhere in that plethora of information, there might be the one lead to the real "Ted." But where?

Captain Nick Mackie took a brief vacation, a two-day hunting trip. As he climbed a hill in eastern Washington, he was felled by the first of the heart attacks which would eventually mean the end of his career in law enforcement; no one who had watched him agonize over the girls'

disappearances,

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who had seen him work ten-hour days, doubted that the strain had contributed to his coronary. He was only fortytwo. Mackie recovered and was back to work within a few weeks, and the search for the smiling, tanned man in the white tennis outfit continued without let-up.

Ted Bundy had returned to Seattle in mid-September, and was back in Utah within a few days, ready to begin law classes at the University of Utah. He'd found an apartment in a big, old dormered house at 565

First Avenue in Salt Lake City, a house quite similar to the Rogers's where he'd lived in Seattle. He moved into Number 2, and soon had it decorated to his satisfaction. He got a job as a night dormitory manager on campus, and his new life had begun. He could make ends meet by getting a partial rent decrease for managing the building where he lived, and he drew $2.10 an hour at the dorm. Soon, he had a better paying job as a campus security officer at the University of Utah. He still phoned Meg often, but he met many new women in Utah. There was Gallic Fiore, a fey, almost-kooky freckled girl who lived in the house on First Avenue; Sharon Auer, who was a law student; another pretty girl who lived in Bountiful, just north of Salt Lake City. Much later, when I would see him again, when he had become the number one suspect in so many killings and disappearances, he asked me, "Why should I want to attack women? I had all the female companionship I wanted. I must have slept with at least a dozen women that first year in Utah, and all of them went to bed with me willingly."

I didn't doubt it. Women had always liked Ted Bundy. Why indeed would he have needed to take any woman by force?

During that fall of 1974, I had no knowledge whatsoever of criminal activity in Utah. It was hundreds of miles from my "territory," and I was kept busy dealing with cases in the Northwest. I had. learned that I would have to have major surgery-elective* but something that couldn't wait. It would mean that I wouMn't be able to work for at least a month. I had no choice but to write twice as many stories so that I could bank enough to see us through.