The Stranger Beside Me (29 page)

"That's a doctor who did a psychological profile on me for John

[O'Connell]. He told John, off the record, that he couldn't see how I could have done it."

Many of the people moving past us, wearing civilian clothes, nod and speak to Ted. It is all very civilized.

"Ilm in the 'fish tank,' " he explains. "There are forty of us in the diagnostic center. The ~Ju

isolated."

I Still, he admits to a good deal of trepidation on his arrival at Point-of-the-Mountain. He is aware that men convicted of crimes against women have a high mortality rate inside the walls. "They were lined up to see me when I arrived. I had to

walk the gauntlet."

But he has found prison much better than jail. He is rapidly becoming a "jailhouse lawyer." "I'll survive inside-if I do-because of my brain, my knowledge of the law. They seek me out for legal advice, and they're all in awe of John. I only had one really bad moment. This one guy-a killer who literally ripped out the throat of the man he killed-walked over to me and I thought I'd had it. He was only interested in knowing about John, in finding out how he could get John to represent him. I get along fine with all of them."

He glances at the locked gate behind me. "They left it open when you went for your I.D. I saw the coats here, the door open, and th^ thought of escaping flashed through my mind, but only for a minute." The trial just finphed rankles Ted and he wants to discuss it. He insists that Carol DaRonch was talked into her identification of him by the Salt Lake County detectives. "Her original description of the man said he had dark brown eyes. Mine are blue. She couldn't make up her mind about the

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moustache and she said his hair was dark, greased back. She I.D.'d my car from a polaroid and the film was over-exposed; it made the car look blue and it's really tan. They showed her my picture so many times. Of course, she recognized it. But, in court, she couldn't even identify the man who picked her up and drove her to the police station.

"Jerry Thompson said he saw three pair of'patent leather shoes in my closet. Why didn't he take a picture of them? Why didn't he pick them up for evidence? I've never owned patent leather shoes. Somebody said I wore black patent leather boots to church. Would I wear a maniac's costume to church?

"She never saw the crowbar. All she said she felt was a many sided steel or iron tool when she grasped it from behind. She said it was over her head."

Ted is as scornful of the psychologist, Al Carlisle, who is administering the tests to him as he is of the Utah detectives. Most of the tests are the standard ones that any psychology student is familiar with: the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index) consisting of hundreds of questions that can be answered "yes" or "no" with some deliberate "lie" questions repeated at intervals. I spotted the lie questions when I was a freshman in college, particularly, "Do you ever think about things too bad to talk about?" The "correct" answer is

"yes"-everybody does, but many people write "no." For Ted Bundy, that test was kindergarten stuff. The TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) : look at a picture and tell a story from it. The Rorshach or "ink blot" test. Ted had administered these tests himself to patients. The Utah State Prison had its own psychological test, a series of adjectives where the subject underlines those that apply to his personality.

"He wants to know about my childhood, my family, my sex life, and I tell him what I can. He's happy and he says do I want to see him again?

So I tell him 'O.K.' Why not?"

We pause as another group moves through the hallway.

"The next time I meet him, he's smiling. He has a diagnosis. I am a passive-aggressive personality. The man is so pleased with himself, Ann, and he sits back waiting. He expects more from me. What does he want? A full confession?"

I say little during our visit; he has so much to get off his chest, and, with the exception of visits from Sharon Auer and occasionally from O'Connell and Bruce Lubeck, his associate,

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j Ted feels he has had no one to talk to who can communicate on his level.

: "John thinks T should have gotten angry in court. He went I' to law school with Judge Hanson, and he knows the man. I was sitting there jxist trying to understand the motivations behind the prosecutors, and it was just too ridiculous to show emotion about. But John thinks I should have gotten mad!"

We talk about Sharon and Meg. He has known Sharon for

• more than a year, and she visits him faithfully every Wednesday and Sunday. "Don't mention Sharon to Meg. Sharon's jealous of Meg, and Meg doesn't really know about Sharon."

I promise that I won't involve myself in his complicated romantic life, and I marvel that he can keep two intense relationships going while he's locked up with a possible life sentence hanging over him.

"My mother's upset with Meg for telling the King County Police that I was illegitimate." The legitimacy of Ted's birth will eventually become the least of Louise Bundy's worries.

"This place . . . they've got everything they want in here: drugs, speed. I won't do drugs. I'm not going to do the visual prison trip. I'm adjusting, and I want to work for prison reform. I'm innocent, but I can work from the inside."

Ted still wants to write, and he feels that he can get writing out to me through Sharon. Sharon regularly carries papers, legal briefs, in with her when she visits. She could carry his writing out and send it to me.

"I need $15,000 to hire private detectives; I think Carol DaRonch, or someone close to her, knew the man who attacked her. I need money to hire a team of independent psychologists to submit a report to the sentencing board. Everybody makes decisions about me and I'm not even allowed to sit in on the meetings . . ."

"I don't think you should try to publish anything before the first of June," I said. "And Colorado. There's still Colorado."

"I talked to Color^o; they have no claim on me."

"What about those credit card slips in Colorado?" He smiles. "It's ifbt against the law to be in Colorado. Sure, I was there, but a lot of people go to Colorado."

I ask him if, when he writes, he will include a description of the murder cases, and he tells me that he believes those "sensational cases" will be essential to selling his book. "Sam

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Shepard was found innocent after years in prison," he recalls, "and his book on an innocent man's ordeal sold."

Sitting there in that airless cubicle, I am once again on his side. He seems too frail, so beleaguered by forces over which he has no control. And yet the charisma is still there. I believe his position as a man who is, as he has been most of his life, in a situation that has no relevance to the real Ted inside.

He remembers my world, and politely asks how my house sale is going, how my children are. He begs me to stand by Meg, tells me how much he loves her and misses her.

And then the guards are back. They tap him on the shoulder. They have given us an extra fifteen minutes. He rises, hugs me again, kisses me on the cheek. They pat him down again. That's why they didn't search me; if I'd given him anything, they would find it before I left. The door slides open for me, and I pause for a minute, watching him as he is led back into the belly of the prison, dwarfed by the two guards.

"Hey lady . . . Goddammit! Watch out!"

The door is automatically closing, and I leap forward just in time to escape being caught in its metal jaws. The guard stares at me as if I'm retarded. Lieutenant Tanner thanks me politely for coming, walks me to the prison's front door.

And then I am outside again, past the twin towers, in my car and on the road back toward Salt Lake City. The wind has kicked up a dust storm and the prison behind me is almost obliterated from view. Suddenly, there are red lights whirling atop a van in back of me. I have become paranoid in that hour and a half at Point-of-the-Mountain, and I wonder why they are chasing me. What did I do? The van pulls up, closer, closer, and I prepare to pull over, and then it turns off on a side road, its wail fading in the wind.

I realize I am talking to myself. No, no ... he couldn't have done it. He's been railroaded in there by public opinion. That man I just talked to is the same man I've always known. He has to be innocent. Driving toward the city, I pass the turn-offs for Midvale, for Murray, names that had never been anything before but places on a map, now the sites of two of the abductions. I pass commuters, bored with their daily routine, and I am so thankful to be free. I can go to my motel, have dinner with a friend, get on a ptane and go back to Seattle. Ted can't. He is locked up with the rest of the "fish." How could this happen .

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to a young man with such a future ahead of him? I am so caught up in my reverie that I miss the turn to my motel, and wander, lost, in the wide, clean, but confusing streets of Salt Lake City. It was that night-April 1, 1976-when I had the dream. It was very frightening, jarring me awake in a strange room in a strange city. I found myself in a large parking lot, with cars backing out and racing away. One of the cars ran over an infant, injuring it terribly, and I grabbed it up, knowing it was up to me to save it. I had to get to a hospital, but no one would help. I carried the baby, wrapped almost completely in a gray blanket, into a car rental agency. They had plenty of cars, but they looked at the baby in my arms and refused to rent me one. I tried to get an ambulance, but the attendants turned away. Finally, in desperation, I found a wagon-a child's wagon-and I put the injured infant in it, pulling it behind me for miles until I found an emergency room.

I carried the baby, running, up to the desk. The admitting nurse glanced at the bundle in my arms. "No, we will not treat it."

"But it's still alive! It's going to die if you don't do something."

"It's better. Let it die. It will do no one any good to treat it." The nurse, the doctors, everyone, turned and moved away from me and the bleeding baby.

And then I looked down at it. It was not an innocent baby; it was a demon. Even as I held it, it sunk its teeth into my hand and bit me. I did not have to be a Freudian scholar to understand my dream; it was all too clear. Had I been trying to save a monster, trying to protect something or someone who was too dangerous and evil tosurvive?

I

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Something deep in my unconscious mind had surfaced, had told me forcefully that I perhaps believed that Ted Bundy was a killer. But I had made my commitment to keep in contact with him, no matter what the future would hold. I suspected that he did not feel things the way I did, but I could not believe that he was not laboring under a terrible weight. I felt that perhaps I might one day be the vehicle through which he could rid himself of that weight. If he would talk to me about what had happened, could reveal the facts still hidden, it would not only help him to receive the redemption he had alluded to in his poem, it could give some measure of relief, of finality, to the parents and relatives who still waited to learn what had happened to their daughters. Oddly, I could never picture Ted as a murderer, never visualize what had happened. It was probably best that I couldn't. When I wrote to him, my letters had to be to the man I remembered, or I couldn't do it.

Once before, Ted had called me when he was in the grip of some emotional anxiety. Although he had denied making that call to me on November 20, 1974, I had seen the phone records. He had called that night, and I sensed that there would come a day when he would need me again. Something seemed to have gone so terribly wrong with Ted's mind, and I now suspected the "sick" part of him was capable of murder. If that was true, then he would need someone who could listen, who would not judge, but who might help to make his confessions easier. I felt that Ted might be able to expiate his guilt through his writing, and I continued to encourage him to write.

He had asked me to call Meg. In our prison visit, he had told me "I love Meg spiritually," and I wondered if that did not mean that Meg was caught up with a man who, even if he were not in prison, would never marry her. For her sake, I

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wrote to him: "My

discussions we have had

wrote to him: My gut reaction to discussions we have had about Meg recently-and years ago-is that you do not ultimately see your future with her as much as you love her and as much history as you share with her. There is something missing, something essential to a forever-after relationship. This, of course, is not something I would discuss with her, but I will encourage any effort she puts forth to become a complete person in her own right, so that she does not need any man quite as much as she needs you now."

He seemed to agree, but there would be letters where he was terrified that he would lose her. Even so, there was Sharon, and I kept my promise not to discuss either woman with the other.

I did call Meg, and she remembered me from that long-ago Christmas party. She seemed anxious to meet me again and we set up an appointment to have dinner together.

On April 7th (although he misdated the letter again as March 7, 1976), I had a letter from Ted, the first since I'd returned from Utah. The small white envelopes furnished by the prison all had a preprinted return address giving a post office box in Draper, Utah, and above that, Ted wrote "T.R. Bundy."

Ted had pulled himself together now, an effort that would never fail to make me pause and consider the ability he had to do that. He could somehow manage to recoup and recover under such tremendous stress and adjust to each new situation.

His letter was an apology, in part, because he had usurped much of the conversation in our visit in prison. "I have developed a typical prisoner's syndrome: the obsession with my legal case . . . the trial and the verdict live in me like some cerebral ulcer." He was writing many letters and observations in his cell, and commented that his left hand (he is left-handed) had become so strong th»t he broke his shoe laces without even trying. I