The Stranger Beside Me (22 page)

"Listen, you have contacts with the police. Could you find out why they're subpoenaing my law school records down here?" A dozen thoughts raced through my mind. Why now? Why after thirteen months? Was Ted being investigated because of what I had done so long before? Had I implicated him in something that apparently had him very concerned? I had never heard of Carol DaRonch, Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, °r Debby Kent. I was completely unaware of the Utah investigation, and it didn't seem possible that the Task Force would wait more than a year to follow up on a lead I had given.

I answered slowly. "Ted, I probably could find out, but I wouldn't do anything underhanded. I'd have to tell them who wanted to know."

"No problem. I'm just curious. Go ahead and tell them that Ted Bundy wants to know. Call me back, collect, at

801-531-7733 if you find out anything."

I stared at the phone in my hand. I truly couldn't believe the conversation just finished. Ted had sounded exactly as he always had: cheerful and confident. I debated calling King

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County Police. I'd never interfered in their investigations, and I hesitated now. It was almost four o'clock, and the detectives would be going off shift within a few minutes.

I called the county's Major Crimes Unit, and Kathy McChesney answered. I explained that Ted Bundy was an old friend of mine, and that he had just called me requesting information about the subpoena. There was a long pause, and the receiver was covered while she conferred with someone in the office. Finally, she was back on the line.

"Tell him . . . tell him, that he's just one of 1,200 people being checked out, that it's just a routine inquiry."

They were stalling-not me-but Ted. I'd been around police homicide units long enough to know that they wouldn't be requesting records from that many suspects, that something was definitely up. I didn't argue; Kathy was clearly uncomfortable. "O.K. I'll tell him that." Subpoenas are not 'issued w'rîhôut probable cause"; obviously, something was happening, something big. I felt a chill. Not even a television script could make it believable that a crime writer could sign a contract to write a book about a killer, and then have the suspect turn out to be her close friend. It wouldn't wash. I called Ted back that night, waited as the phone rang six, seven, eight times. Finally, he answered, panting. "I had to run up the stairs. I was down on the front porch," he told me.

"I called them," I began, "and they said to tell you that you're only one of about 1,200 guys they're checking out." "Oh . . . O.K., great." He didn't seem worried, but I wondered how somebody as sharp as Ted was could believe that.

"If you have any more questions, they said you could just call them direct." "Right."

"Ted .. . what's happening down there?" "Nothing much. Oh, I got picked up on a Mickey Mouse thing in August by the state patrol. They're claiming I had burglary tools if my car, but the charge won't stand up." Ted Bundy with burglary tools? Impossible. But he continued. "I think they have some kind of a wild idea that I'm connected with some cases up in Washington. Do you remember something about some missing girls up there?"

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Of course, I remembered. I'd been living with it since January of 1974. He claimed to have almost no knowledge of the cases, and he'd almost thrown away his last statement. It was as if he'd said he was wanted for a traffic violation in Washington. I didn't know what to say. I knew that whatever was coming down, it had to be based on more than my suggesting his name.

"I'm going to be in a line-up tomorrow," he said. "Everything's going to turn out all right. But if it doesn't, you'll be reading about me in the papers."

I couldn't understand how a line-up in Utah could have anything to do with the cases in Washington. He hadn't mentioned Carol DaRonch or the kidnapping case at all. If he was a suspect in Washington, he would be in a line-up in Seattle; the only people who could conceivably identify the "Ted" from Washington were the witnesses from Lake Sammamish. But something kept me from asking him more.

"Hey, thanks. I'll keep in touch," he said, and we said goodbye. On October 2nd, a brilliant gold and blue autumn day, I attended a junior high school football game. My son, Andy, was starting at right end. He broke his thumb on the first play, but his team won, and we were in a good mood as we stopped at McDonald's for hamburgers on the way home.

Back in the car, I switched on the radio. A bulletin interrupted the record playing, "Theodore Robert Bundy, a former Tacoma resident, was arrested today in Salt Lake City and charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault."

I must have gasped. My son looked at me, "Mom, what's wrong?"

"It's Ted," I managed to stammer.

"Isn't that your friend from the Crisis Clinic?"

"Yes. He told me I might be reading about him in the papers." This time, there was to be no quick release on P.R. Ted's bail was set at $100,000 and he was locked in the county jail.

Detective Dick Reed called me that night. "You were right!" he said. I didn't want to be right. I didn't want to be right at all. I slept little that night. Even when I'd suggested Ted's name to Reed, I hadn't really visualized him as a man capable of violence; I hadn't allowed my thinking to go that far. I

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kept seeing Ted as I remembered him, picturing him hunched over the Crisis Clinic phones, hearing his warm, sympathetic voice. I tried to picture him now behind bars, and I couldn't.

Early the next morning, I received a phone call from the Associated Press. "We have a message for Ann Rule, transmitted over our wires from Salt Lake City."

"This is Ann."

"Ted Bundy wants you to know that he is all right, that things will work out."

I thanked them, hung up the phone and it rang almost at once. First, a reporter from the Seattle Times wondering what my connection was with Ted Bundy. Was I a secret girlfriend? What could I say about Ted? I explained who I was-a writer like the reporter calling. "I've done several pieces for the Sunday Times Magazine. Don't you know the name?"

"Oh, yeah-Rule. So why did he send you that message over A.P.?"

"He's a friend. He wanted me to know he was all right." I didn't want to be quoted by name. I was still too confused by what had happened. "Just say that the man I know couldn't be responsible for any of the things he's accused of."

The next call followed immediately. It was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who had also picked up the A.P. message. I repeated what I'd told the Times reporter.

It was as if someone had died suddenly. People who had known Ted from the Crisis Clinic-Bob Vaughn, Bruce Cummins, John Eshelman-all calling to talk about it. And none of us believed Ted capable of what he'd been charged with. It was unthinkable. We kept recalling anecdotes about Ted, trying to convince each other that what we were reading in blaring headlines could not be happening.

I didn't know then that Carol DaRonch, Jean Graham, and Debby Kent's girlfriend, Jolynne Beck, who had seen the man in the auditorium on November 8th, had all picked Ted out of the Utah lin^-up on October 2nd. Ted had been one suspect, standing ia a seven man line-up, surrounded by detectives, all of'than a little older, a little heavier than he was. The question would arise: was this a fair line-up?

I wrote to Ted on October 4th, telling him of support from Seattle, of the calls from his friends, of the favorable statements being published in the Seattle papers, promising him that I would continue to write. I ended that letter, "There is

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nothing in this life that is a complete tragedy-nothing-try to remember that."

Looking back, I wonder at my naivete. Some things in this life are complete tragedies. Ted Bundy's story may well be one of them. I was about to become a part of Ted's life again. To this day, I do not know what tied us together. It was more than my zeal as a writer; it was more than his tendency to manipulate women who might be able to help him. There is a vast, gray area somewhere in between that I have never been able to clearly define.

His attorney, John O'Connell, called me during Ted's first week in jail, seeking information on the investigation in Washington. I could tell him nothing; that would have meant a betrayal of my responsibility to detectives in Seattle. All I could do was keep writing to Ted. Whatever his crimes might have been, whatever hidden things might someday be revealed, he seemed to need someone.

I was beginning to be Tom apart.

And Ted began to write to me, long scrawled letters on yellow legal pad sheets. His first correspondence was full of his sense of displacement-letters from a young man who had never been in jail. He could not quite believe it; he was both astonished by his plight and outraged, but he was quickly learning the ropes of survival inside. Much of his prose was turgid and overly dramatic, but he was caught in a situation that seemed impossible for Ted Bundy, and he could certainly be forgiven his tendency toward pathos.

"My world is a cage," he wrote on October 8, 1975. "How many men before me have written these same words? How many have struggled vainly to describe the cruel metamorphosis that occurs in captivity? And how many have concluded that there are no satisfactory words to communicate their feelings except to cry, 'My God!' I want my freedom!" His cellmate was a fiftyish old-timer whom Ted saw as a "star-crossed alcoholic;" the man quickly set about teaching the "kid" the ropes. Ted had learned to hide his cigarettes and, when they were gone, to roll his own. He learned to tear matches in half-because matches didn't last long. He saved oranges, styrofoam cups, toilet paper, realizing he was dependent on the whim of the trustees for all the small things that made jail life a little more bearable. He learned to say

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"please" and "sir" when he wanted to make a phone call or needed an extra blanket or soap.

He wrote that he was growing personally, however, that he was discovering new things about himself and through his quiet observation of his fellow prisoners. He praised his friends' loyalty and agonized over what the publicity surrounding him might be doing to those close to him. Still, he never lost sight of a happy ending. "The nighttime hours are the hard hours. I make them easier by dwelling on the building which must be done when the storm is past. I will be free. And, someday, Ann, you and I will look upon this letter as a note from a nightmare." It was a note from a nightmare. The flowery, often trite, phrases could not take away from the fact that being locked up was a kind of hell for Ted.

I continued to write to him, and to send whatever small checks I could manage for cigarette and canteen money. I didn't know what I believed, and all my letters were couched in terms that were deliberately ambiguous. They contained information on what was appearing in the local press, details about what I was writing, and on calls from mutual friends. I tried to block the pictures that occasionally seized my mind and shook it. I tried to think back to the old days; it was the only way I could respond to Ted as I always had.

The second letter from the Salt Lake County Jail came on October 23rd, and much of it was a poem, countless stanzas on life in jail. He was still only an observer-not a participant. The poem rambled over both sides of sixteen pages of the yellow legal paper.

He called it "Nights of Days," and it began: This is no way to be Man ought to be free That man should be me. The meter «ten faltered, but the words all rhymed as he again bemoaned his lack of privacy and the cuisine in the jail, the omnipresent game shows and soap operas on the television set in the day room, programs which he termed "visual brain cancer."

He wrote-as he often would-of his belief in God. We had never talked about religion, but now Ted was apparently spending a lot of his time reading the Bible.

150 THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

Sleep comes on slowly

Read the words of the wholly (sic)

The scriptures bring peace

They talk of release

They bring us to God

In here that seems odd

But His gift is so clear

I find that He's near

Mercy and redemption

Without an exception

He puts me at ease

Jailer, do what you please

No harm can befall me

When the Savior does call me.

The endless poem talked of another release; sleep. He could forget the nightmare he was living, the bars, and the screams of other prisoners, when he slept, so he napped whenever possible. He was trapped in a "caged human sea."

_ Moving easily from the Bible to the menu in jail, a bit of his old humor surfaced,

It makes me feel blue

Taking food from the animals in the zoo

Porkchops tonight

Jews are uptight

I gave mine away

It still has a tail

And as for dessert

The cook, that old flirt

Surprised us with mellow

Peach jello.

For all his days in jail to come, he would decry jello. As for the other residents of the jail, Ted found childlike-"Overgrown kids."

Some really believe They were born to deceive To make a bank roll From money they stole They do not relate To going it straight them

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Except when in court

They sometimes resort

To making a plea

For a new life and leniency.

His own inner ordeal emerged at the end of the poem; the fear of the

"cage" was there.

Days of days Self-control pays Don't lose your mind Panic's not kind ... Days of days My integrity stays.

Was this poem contrived? Something to play on my sympathies which really needed no stimulus at all? Or was it the true outpouring of Ted's anguish?

In the fall of 1975, I was terribly confused, besieged on one side by detectives who felt sure that Ted was as guilty as hell, and, on the other, by the man himself who insisted again and again that he was innocent and being persecuted. It was a dichotomy of emotions that would stay with me for a long, long time.