The Stranger Beside Me (30 page)

Ted commenteqfon the link between us, a lit**, that seemed to be growing stronger: "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." Again, he urged me to take care of Meg for him, and he 202

asked that I suggest to Meg that she read me some of the love poems he had sent to her. He enclosed one of those poems, a poem he had printed on blue paper in the prison's printing facility. It ended, I send you this kiss deliver this body to hold. I sleep with you tonight with words of love untold. I would love you, if I might with words that unfold these arms to press you tight.

When I met Meg for dinner on April 30. 1976. she carried with her a dozen or more poems, love poems from Ted. She had typed them carefully, with copies for herself and for Ted. They were romantic sonnets, something any woman in love would have clung to. And Meg was certainly a woman in love. Yet, even as I read them. I was struck with the incongruity of the situation. This was the woman who had placed Ted in his present jeopardy, and / knew that Sharon Auer was also in love with him-Sharon who thought Ted loved her.

Meg wept as she read over the poems, pointing out particularly tender phrases to me. "T can't understand how he can forgive me after what I did to him, how he can write me poems like this." Meg slipped the poems back into the large manilla envelope and glanced around the room. No one had noticed her tears; the heavy-weight championship fight was on the television set above the bar and everyone was staring at it.

"You know," she said softly. "I don't make friends easily. I had one boyfriend and one woman friend. And now, T've really lost them both. I don't see Lynn any more. I can't forgive her for making me doubt Ted, and I don't know when I'll ever see him again."

"What was there, Meg," I asked. "What was there that made you go to the police? Was there anything besides Lynn's suspicions?" She shook her head. "I can't tell you. T know you're writing a book. I hope you understand, but I just can't talk about it." I didn't press her. I wasn't with her to try to squeeze in-

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formation out of her. I was with her because Ted had asked me to stand by her. Pushing her would be too much like poking a creature with a stick, a creature already hurt.

And yet, Meg wanted information from me. She was jealous of Ted, even when he was locked up in the Utah State Prison. She wanted to know about Sharon. I told her, truthfully, that I really didn't know much about Sharon Auer. I didn't mention that I had talked to Sharon on the phone when I was in Salt Lake City, and that I'd heard Sharon's voice turn icy when I mentioned Meg. That was my first realization that Sharon was seemingly as unsure of Ted, as possessive, as Meg was. Meg struck me as terribly vulnerable, and I wondered why Ted could not let her go. She was thirtv-one. and she wanted-needed-a marriage, a chance to have the children -si«? icsjgea JOT-bsfsœ-îbsœ 5&as too JESat a gap between them and Liane, before Meg was too old. Ted must have known that he would not be free for years, and yet he bound her to him through his poems, letters, calls. If anything, she loved him more than she ever had, and she was trying to cope with TBat?_^dlt.*has^4ïa,r'is.'iJd.vs»s..

It was odd; even as I mused about how Meg would survive with her complete dependence on Ted, I received a letter from him-on May 17th-wherein he seemed terrified of losing her! He was sweating out his last two weeks before the June sentencing date, and that may have contributed to his anxiety. He seemed to i~el that Meg was pulling away from him, and he asked me to go to her and plead his case. He had no real reason to doubt Meg's loyalty, but he "sensed vibrations."

"You are the only person whom I trust," he wrote, "who is both sensitive and in a position to approach Meg for me. I think it would be easier for Meg to express herself to you than to me." The letter ended with his opinions on the psychiatrists and psychologists who had spent three months examining him:

. . . after conducting numerous tests and extensive examinations, (they) have found me normal and are deeply perplexed. Both of us know that none of us is 'normal.' Perhaps what I should say is that they find no explanation to substantiate the verdict or other allegations. No seizures, no psychosis, no disassociative reac-204 THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

tion, no unusual habits, opinions, emotions or fears. Controlled, intelligent, but, in no way, crazy. The working theory is now that I have completely forgotten everything, a theory which is disproved by their own results. 'Very interesting,' they keep mumbling. I may have convinced one or two of them that I am innocent.

I did call Meg on Ted's behalf and found that she was completely unchanged in her devotion to him. She had managed to tell him that in a two-minute phone call to the prison, and urged me to assure him that she wasn't dating anyone else. He did not want to let her go, and Meg apparently did not want to leave him.

On June 5th, Meg came to my home to spend the evening. She had just seen her parents off after a week-long visit and •WHS tense became they

-were -not sympathetic about her continued allegiance to Ted. She was also apprehensive about Sharon, more aware of Sharon's relationship with Ted than he realized. I was in the middle of a situation that made me uneasy; I didn't want to cover for Ted if he was deluding Meg, but I didn't want to tell her about Sharon's twice weekly visits to the Utah State Prison either. I suspected that I was being subtly manipulated in keeping Meg bound to Ted.

I wrote to him about Meg on June 6th: "I think that she is aware of Sharon's relationship to you, but I stressed that I really know nothing about it, and I don't know, and I don't want to know. When the time comes to thinking of everyday conflicts, you will have to get your act together."

Ted's future was still in limbo. The sentencing on the DaRonch kidnapping conviction, set for June 1st, had been postponed for thirty more days. It was conceivable-but not likely-that he would receive probation. Or he could receive life in prison. Psychologists were still wrestling with his personality. I had received a phone call from Al Carlisle, the psychologist in charge of the report on Ted, one Sunday evening. He began abruptly, "Do you know Ted Bundy?"

"Who wants to know?" I'd responded; knowing Ted Bundy was becoming something that one did not brag about.

He had then identified himself, sounded a shy, diffident man. I told him only what I had seen-there was no point in my getting my dreams and fears into what was allegedly a rational psychological study. I explained that, in all my contacts

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with Ted, I had found him normal, empathetic, friendly, gentle. And that was true.

"Well," he said. "I've talked to a lot of people about him and I've been surprised at the widely divergent opinions about him." I wanted to ask what they were, but it didn't seem the proper response. I waited.

"I like him myself. I've spent about twelve hours with him, and I like him." Carlisle wanted copies of the two "Ted letters" which had accrued such undeserved fame, and I said I would send them-but only with Ted's permission. Ted gave that, and I mailed them to the prison psychologist. Ted wrote again on June 9th. With sentencing just around the corner, he had geared up for a fight. "The prospects are exciting!" Ted found the psychological examinations "malicious, slanted, and infernal." Harking back to his own psychology training, he felt prepared to deal with the questions that the doctors asked him and his friends-questions which suggested that he might be strange, homosexual, or deviant in his demands during sexual intercourse. He was angry because his examiners had told him that some of his friends had had negative things to say about him, but would not reveal the content of interviews or the names of friends.

"I was aghast! Is this America? Am I to be ''tacked anonymously? I listed the names of several close friends, people who know me well. None had been contacted. Who are my detractors? No response . .." He had received some answers. The testing team had reported to him that the nameless interviewees had indicated that he was changeable.

"Well, sometimes you would appear happy, pleasant. Other times you would seem like a different person and unresponsive," they had told him.

"They are trying so desperately to create a split personality," he wrote angrly. "I'll tear them apart."

He was, indeeda looking forward to the hearing on his mental capabilities* positive that he could tear down all that the diagnostic team had constructed in the three months just past. Ted had begun to enter into the legal fight for his own freedom, and his participation would escalate over the years ahead. He was "up," confident that his mind, his intelligence,

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could surpass whatever the psychiatric examination purported to reveal. I think he truly believed that, through his own rhetoric, he would be free. Ted did make his statements to Judge Hanson. As he made his plea, he was the cocky, witty Ted, the man so removed from the facts that the whole situation was ridiculous. It was a posture that would irritate several judges and juries in his future court wranglings, but it was seemingly an attitude necessary for the survival of his ego. I have always felt that Ted would, literally, rather die than be humiliated-would face life in prison or the electric chair before humbling himself in any way.

At the hearing, Ted was scornful as he attacked the arrests in August and October of 1975. He admitted to a certain "strangeness" of behavior when he'd been confronted by Sergeant Bob Hay ward, but could see no connection with his actions, with the contents of his car, and the DaRonch kidnapping. He had had no alibi for the night of November 8, 1974, and he argued, "If I cannot remember precisely what occurred on a date which is now eighteen and one half months prior to my arrest for kidnapping, it is because my memory does not improve with time. It is safe to say what I was not doing, however. I was not having heart surgery, nor was I taking ballet lessons, nor was I in Mexico, nor was I abducting a complete stranger at gunpoint. There are just some things a person does not forget and just some things a person is not inclined to do under any circumstances."

Then Ted was sentenced on June 30th, despite his tearful plea that his being in prison would serve no purpose. "Someday, who knows when, five or ten or more years in the future, when the time comes when I can leave, I suggest you ask yourself where we are, what's been accomplished, was the sacrifice of my life worth it all? Yes, I will be a candidate for rehabilitation. But not for what I have done, but for what the system has done to me."

He drew a comparatively light sentence. One to fifteen years. Because no other charges of such magnitude had been brought against him, he was sentenced under provisions for a lesser second-degree felony. All things being equal, he could hope to be paroled as quickly as eighteen months hence.

But, of course, all things were not equal. The investigation into the murder of Caryn Campbell in Aspen, Colorado was accelerating. Investigator Mike Fisher had the credit card slips, and he had received word from the FBI lab's criminal-

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ist, Bob Neill, that, among the hairs found when Ted's Volkswagen was processed and vacuumed, were hairs that were microscopically alike in class and characteristic to not one-but three-of Bundy's suspected victims: Caryn Campbell. Melissa Smith, and Carol DaRonch. Hairs are not as individual as fingerprints, yet Bob Neill, a FBI crime lab expert for two decades, stated he had never found three victims'

purported hairs in one spot before. "The chances of three different hair samples being so microscopically alike and not belonging to the victims are one in 20,-000. I've never seen anything like it." One Washington detective mentioned to me that the crowbar found in Ted's car matched the depression in Caryn Campbell's skull. There was said to be an eye witness, the woman who had seen the strange young man in a second floor corridor of the Wildwood Inn minutes before Caryn vanished. The word among law enforcement networks was that the Colorado case was much stronger than the Utah kj1napping case had been. If Ted was aware of the burgeoning Colorado case, and I suspect he was, he was still more caught up in the emotions that lingered after the sentencing in Utah when he wrote to me on July 2, 1976. That letter was classic in that it was the evaluation by the subject himself-an honors psychology graduate-of the psychiatric evaluation done on him. The letter was typed, typed on an ancient machine with letters clotted with ink, but Ted's pride in his hour-and-ahalf dissection of the psychiatric evaluation transcended the blurred pages. I was whistling in the wind, yet in a curious sort of way, I felt a deep sense of fulfillment. I felt relaxed but emphatic; controlled, but sincere and filled with emotion. It didn't matter who was listening, although I desired each word to strike the Judge as forcefully as possible. Briefly, all too briefly, I was myself again, amongst free people, usinf all the skill I could muster, fighting the only way I know how: with words and logic. And all too briefly, I was testing the dream of being an attorney.

He knew he had lost, but he blamed that loss on the police, the prosecutors, the judge, on what he termed "the weak-208

nesses of men who were too timid, too blind, too frightened, to accept the cruel deception of the state's case."

The psychiatric diagnoses had concluded that Ted Bundy was not psychotic, neurotic, the victim of organic brain disease, alcoholic, addicted to drugs, suffering from a character disorder or amnesia, and was not a sexual deviate.

Ted quoted DT. Austin the psychiatrist, the one member of the team whom he had thought most forthright: "I feel that Mr. Bundy is either a man who has no problems or is smart enough and clever enough to appear close to the edge of 'normal.' . . . Since it has been determined by the Court that he is not telling the truth regarding the present crime, I seriously question if he can be expected to tell the truth regarding participation in any program or probation agreement." Ted's conclusion was that Judge Hanson had swayed the entire evaluation by bis originaJ verdict, and that the diagnostic team had merely groomed their report to match the verdict.