The Stranger Beside Me (19 page)

Ted's name was now listed-four times-in that endless computer read-out in the Washington State Task Force Office. But he was still one among several thousand, a man with no adult criminal record at all, and certainly a man whose job record and educational background did not stamp him as a "criminal type."

He had been in Washington, and now he was in Utah. His name was Ted, and he drove a Volkswagen. His girlfriend, Meg, had been suspicious enough to turn him in, but Meg was a very jealous woman, a woman who had been lied to; there were a score or more jealous women who had turned their boyfriends' names in as possible "Teds." It was after that 1974 Intermountain Conference, after more urging from Lynn Banks, that Meg Anders had gone a step further. She placed a call to the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, and repeated her suspicions about Ted Bundy. Her voice had had a near-hysterical edge to it, and Capt. Hayward too suspected that this woman on the long distance line from Seattle was exaggerating, was allowing herself to see connections that were, at best, tenuous. He wrote down the name "Ted Bundy" and gave it to Jerry Thompson to add to the burgeoning list of Utah suspects. Without physical evidence, without solid information, detectives cannot rush out and arrest a man. It goes against the grain of our whole philosophy of justice. It would be eight months before Ted Bundy would, through his own actions, place himself squarely in the eye of the law, would almost challenge police to stop him.

What do I remember of the Christmas season of 1974? Very little; there was no reason to. I remember that I was back at work two weeks after surgery, a recuperation cornpounded by a bout with the flu. I couldn't drive yet, but a few of the detectives had taken their free time to tape the vital information on some of their cases which had already been to trial, and they drove out to bring me the tapes so that I could type stories at home.

I remember that the following January brought one wailing wind storm, a storm that whipped across Puget Sound and hit our old beach house with such force that the living room window all across the southern wall was blown in, scattering plants, lamps, and glass shards twenty feet into the room. It looked like a tornado had danced through, and we froze until we could get someone out to put in a new window. That was

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the month the basement flooded, and the roof started to leak in several spots. I can remember being very discouraged, but I can't remember once thinking about Ted Bundy.

Ted came back to Seattle in January of 1975, and spent more than a week with Meg, from January 14th to 23rd, after he had finished his final exams in Utah. Meg didn't tell him that she had turned his name into the police, and she carried a heavy burden of guilt, although no officer had yet approached him. He was so nice to her, was seriously talking marriage again, and her doubts of the fall just past now seemed to be only a nightmare. This was the old Ted, the man she had loved for so many years. She was able to put her fears somewhere far back in her mind. The only woman in Utah that he mentioned to her was Gallic Fiore, whom he described as "flaky." He said that there'd been a goodbye party for Callie sometime after Christmas of 1974, that they'd seen her off on a plane.

He didn't mention that Callie hadn't left for good, that she Was coming back to Salt Lake City.

When Ted left to go back to law school, Meg felt much better. There were plans for her to visit him in Salt Lake City that summer, and he promised to come back to Seattle as soon as he could. Caryn Campbell had vacationed in Aspen, Colorado in January of 1975. Caryn, a registered nurse, was engaged to Dr. Raymond Gadowski of Farmington, Michigan and the pair, along with Gadowski's two children by a prior marriage, were combining a pleasure trip with a medical symposium on cardiology that Gadowski was scheduled to attend in Aspen. The group checked into the plush Wildwood Inn on January llth, and was given a room on the second floor. At twenty-three, Caryn was nine years younger than Gadowski, but she loved him and she got along well with his son, Gregory, eleven, and^his daughter, Jenny, nine. She wanted to get married, and soon. When the couple argued that day, it was because Gadowsti was not particularly anxious to rush into a second marriage. Caryn Campbell was suffering with a slight case of the flu when they arrived, but she was still able to take the youngsters skiing and sightseeing while Gadowski attended seminars. On January 12th, they ate dinner with friends at the

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Stew Pot, and Caryn ordered beef stew. The others had cocktails but Caryn, still feeling queasy, drank only milk.

And then Caryn, Gadowski and the youngsters returned to the cozy lounge at the Wildwood Inn. Gadowski picked up the evening paper, and Caryn remembering that she'd left a new magazine in their room, headed toward the elevator to get it. She carried with her the only key to Room 210. All things being equal, she should have returned to the lounge within ten minutes.

Caryn got off the elevator on the second floor and spoke to several other physicians waiting there, doctors she'd met at the convention. They watched her walk down the hall toward her room. Downstairs, Gadowski finished the paper, and glanced around. His children were playing contentedly, but Caryn hadn't come back. He looked toward the elevators, expecting to see her emerge at any moment. The minutes dragged, and she didn't appear.

Warning the youngsters to stay in the lounge, the young cardiologist went up to their room, and then remembered that Caryn had the key. He knocked, and waited for her to cross the room and open the door. She didn't.

He knocked again, thinking that perhaps she was in the bathroom and hadn't heard him, knocked louder. Still, she didn't open the door. He felt a prickling of alarm; if she had gotten sicker, perhaps fainted inside, she might have hit her head on something, might be unconscious. He sprinted down to the desk, obtained a duplicate key, and ran back to the second floor. The door swung open and the room before him looked exactly as it had when they'd left before dinner. There was no sign of Caryn's purse, and the magazine that she'd meant to get was still on the stand beside the beds. Obviously, she hadn't come up to the room at all.

Puzzled and indecisive, he stood in the empty room, the key in his hand. Then he turned, and walked out into the hallway, locking the door behind him. There were a lot of parties going on that Sunday night, and he figured that his fiancée had probably run into some of their friends, been enticed to stop someplace "for just one drink." She wasn't usually inconsiderate, and she must have known he'd be worried, but then the atmosphere in the lodge was an easy-going one. He checked back in the lounge, and found the children still alone.

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Gadowski paced, hurrying faster and faster, from one bar in the sprawling building to another, listening for the sound of Caryn's laughter, looking for the familiar way she tossed back her hair. The din and the ebullient spirits of the people around him seemed to mock him. Caryn was gone, simply gone, and he couldn't understand it. He gathered up his youngsters and took them to the room. It was 10 P.M. now, and, outside the big warm lodge, it was freezing cold. All Caryn had been wearing when she'd strolled toward the elevator were blue jeans, her light brown wooly jacket and boots. That was warm enough during the day, but it was inconceivable that she'd gone out into the January Colorado night like that.

Gadowski called the Aspen Police Department shortly after ten. The patrolmen who arrived took a missing report, but they assured the Michigan doctor that almost everybody who "disappeared" showed up after the bars and parties broke up.

Gadowski shook his head impatiently. "No, she isn't like that. She was ill. She may have gotten sicker."

A description of the nurse was broadcast to patrolmen on duty in Aspen: twenty-three-year-old woman, five feet, four inches tall, brown shoulder-length hair, the clothes she was wearing. Many times during the night, patrol units would pull up to a young woman wearing jeans, a wooly jacket, only to find that it was someone else; it was never Caryn Campbell.

By morning, Gadowski was distraught after a sleepless night, the children crying and upset. Aspen police detectives moved through the Wildwood Inn, searching room by room, storerooms, closets, even the kitchens, and up through crawl spaces, peering down into the elevator shafts. The pretty nurse wasn't anywhere in the lodge. They questioned every guest, but no one had seen Caryn Campbell after she'd said "Hi" to the group at the elevator on the second floor and walked down the hall toward her room.

Finally, Dr. Gadowski packed up their bags and flew home with his children» hoping each time the phone rang that it would, somehow! be Caryn, with a logical explanation of why she had walked away from him. The call never came.

On February 18th, a recreational employee working along the Owl Creek road a few miles from the Wildwood Inn, noticed a flight of squawking birds that were circling something

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in a snowbank twenty-five feet off the road. He walked through the melting drifts and turned away, sickened. What remained of Caryn Campbell's nude body lay there in the snow, snow stained crimson with her blood.

Pathologist Dr. Donald Clark performed a post mortem examination on the body that dental records verified was Caryn's. She had died of repeated blunt instrument blows to her skull and had, in addition, suffered deep cuts from a sharp weapon. A knife? An axe? There was not enough tissue left in the neck area to say whether she had been strangled, but her hyoid bone had been cracked.

It was much too late to tell if she had been subjected to a sexual attack, but the nude condition of her body pointed to rape as a strong motive. Undigested bits of stew and milk were easily identifiable in her stomach; Caryn Campbell had been killed within hours after she had eaten on January 12th, which would make time-of-death shortly after she had left the lounge of the Wildwood Inn to go up to her room. She had never made it to her room, or, if she had, someone had waited inside for her. That seemed unlikely; the room had shown no signs of struggle at all. Somewhere, along that well-lighted corridor on the second floor of the Wildwood Inn, somewhere between the elevators and Room

210, Caryn had met her killer, and had, seemingly, gone with him without a fight.

It was a disappearance reminiscent of the Georgeann Hawkins case in June of 1974. Less than fifty feet to walk to safety, and then, gone. One California woman tourist had been in that corridor of the Wildwood Inn on the night of January 12th and she had seen a handsome young man who had smiled at her, but she'd thought nothing of it. She had left for home before Caryn Campbell's disappearance became known to other hotel guests.

The winter waned, and back in Washington State the snows had begun to melt and slough off in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. On Saturday, March 1, 1975, two Green River Community College students were working on a forestry survey project on Taylor Mountain, a thickly wooded "mini" mountain east of Highway 18, a two lane highway that cuts through forests between Auburn and North Bend, Washington. The site is about ten miles from the hillside

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where the remains of Janice OU, Denise Naslund, and an unidentified third person (perhaps fourth) were located in September of 1974. It was slow going through the moss shrouded alders, the ground carpeted with sword ferns and fallen leaves.

One of the forestry students looked down. A human skull rested at his feet.

Brenda Ball had been found at last, although it would take dental records to verify that. As they had six months before, King County Police detectives immediately ordered the lonely area cordoned off, and, again, Detective Bob Keppel led over two hundred searchers into the area. Men and dogs moved with painstaking slowness through the dank forest, turning over piles of leaves, rotten stumps.

Denise and Janice had been found only a few miles from the park where they vanished; Brenda's skull was discovered thirty miles away from the Flame Tavern. This could, perhaps, be explained by the fact that she'd intended to hitchhike to Sun Lakes State Park east of the mountains. Highway

18 would have been a likely alternate route to Snoqualmie Pass. Had she gotten into a car with the stranger with a sling on his arm, grateful that she had a ride all the way to Sun Lakes? And had he then pulled over, stopped in this desolate region, and stared at her with the pitiless eyes of a killer?

The discovery of the skull on Taylor Mountain made some kind of macabre sense, but that was all there was to be found of the dark-eyed girl. Even if animals had scattered the remainder of her skeleton, there should have been something more and there was nothing. No more bones, not so much as a tattered rag of her clothing.

Cause of death was impossible to determine, but the skull was fractured on the left side, smashed by a blunt instrument

The grim search went on for two more days.

Early on March 3rd, Bob Keppel slipped and fell as he made his way down a slimy incline. He had stumbled-literally-over another skull one hundred feet away from that of Brenda Ball. *

Dental recorJs would confirm that Keppel had found all that was left of Susan Rancourt, the shy blonde coed who had vanished from Ellensburg, eighty-seven miles away! There was no reason at all for Susan to be here in this lonely grove. It appeared that the killer had established his own graveyard, bringing only his victims' severed heads with him, 130

month after month. It was an ugly supposition to contemplate, but one that could not be ignored.

Susan's skull, too, had been brutally fractured.

As the search went on, the other families waited, dreading that their daughters might be up on Taylor Mountain, that they would hear a knock on their door at any time.

Fifty feet more of the tedious sifting of wet leaves, brushing aside dripping sword ferns. And there was yet another skull. Dental records confirmed this victim was a girl that detectives hadn't expected to find so far away from home. It was that of Roberta Kathleen Parks, missing since the previous May from Corvallis, Oregon-262 miles away. As with the others, it bore the crushing damage of a blunt instrument. The first to vanish was the last to be found. Lynda Ann Healy, the teacher of retarded youngsters, gone fourteen months from her basement room in the University District, could be identified only by her lower mandible. The fillings in the jaw bone matched Lynda's dental charts. Lynda's skull, too, had been carried to Taylor Mountain. Although the search continued from dawn until sunset for another week, no more skulls were found, no clothes, no jewelry. There had been a few dozen small bones, neck bones, but not nearly enough to indicate that the victims' complete bodies had been carried into the forest, and the realization that only the girls' heads had been brought there one at a time over a six months period brought forth more rumors of cults, witchcraft, and satanism.