The Stranger Beside Me (33 page)

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I am anxious that Cosmopolitan et al return payment so you'll be able to rent a helicopter and get me out of here. The prison maintains, falsely, that I had airline schedules. Can you imagine! If I were foolish enough to go to an airport, I certainly wouldn't give a damn which flight I jumped on as long as I was assured the plane could take off and land. Doing well, battling like hell. You know what it takes for the tough to get going.

love, ted,

The talk of escape, however flippant, had begun to flash a warning light on and off like a subliminal message on a television screen, hidden among Ted's discussions of legal battles. But then, all prisoners dream of escape, and all of them talk about it-the possibilities, the odds. A miniscule number actually try.

Ted had mentioned that he would be "having a change of scenery" and that meant that one day he would stop fighting extradition to Colorado, but he would do it in his own good time; he had much research to do first. There was no more money for lawyers, nothing more to be counted on from family and friends in Washington, and that meant he would be in the hands of public defenders. More and more, he was seizing his own legal destiny; like the Little Red Hen, he would do it himself. Almost from the moment I moved into my new home, leaving the sea and the wind to take over the little beach house we'd vacated, my writing fortunes took an upward turn. I had assignments from Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies Home Journal. After years with the pulps, I'd finally broken into the "slicks." Interestingly enough, all my assignments had to do with victims of violent crimes; the American public, in 1976, had finally begun to show concern for the fate of crime victims. Too many people had become victims or knew victims. Because I'd been busy moving and meeting publishing deadlines, I had not written to Ted for threlfe or four weeks, and I got a rather plaintively hostile letter from him in mid-December.

Dear Ann,

I surrender. Did I say something offensive? Worse yet, is my breath offensive? Have my letters been stolen by 224 THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

the C.I.A. and you think I don't write you anymore so you don't write to me? Am I too hopeless a case? (Don't answer that.) I can take it. Yessiree, never let it be said that I lost my cool just because my friends have forgotten me.

It was not a happy season for Ted. For the first time, he was behind bars at Christmastime. Only a year before, we had sat together at the Brasserie Pittsbourg; it seemed that twenty years had passed. Ted's letter was his Christmas message, poems scrawled on the lined paper.

This note must do as my Christmas card to you; a way of thanking you for the merriment you have brought into my life, not to mention the life-sustaining support. Now all I need is one of those quaint verses that all the store-bought cards have:

May Santa's reindeer be so kind Not to leave their droppings On your roof.

It's here!

Don't pretend you couldn't tell.

If you're not into Christmas

Catch the first train to hell.

So just tack up those house lightsi

And mummify the tree

Don't forget, without Christmas cards

You'd never hear from me.

The final poem was a departure from the bitterness of the first two-a religious poem. Ted often referred to God in his letters, although he had never mentioned Hun in any of our conversations outside prison walls. I wrote immediately, and then called Meg to learn that she was on her way to Utah for Christmas and yet another reunion with Ted. I hoped that this visit would not be the catalyst for a renewed spate of dark depression for Ted as her last trip to Utah had been. His days at Point-of-the-Mountain were growing short; he would have to make the decision

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about going to Colorado soon. His name was still not well known in Aspen-except to policemen. Claudine Longet's murder trial was set in Aspen in January, and she was reaping the big headlines. Evidently Meg's Christmas visit was more successful than their meeting in August had been. Ted wrote me two days before Christmas, describing their visit. "She came to me yesterday. In a visit so short and sweet, I am reunited with the missing element in my life. Seeing her is a glimpse of heaven. Touching her gave me a belief in miracles. So often I had dreamed of her that seeing her for real was a dazzling experience. She is gone again, and, again, I feel her absence in each unconscious moment."

He recalled the fight that he and Meg had had after I'd driven him to the Crisis Clinic Christmas party in 1972. After I had dumped him in his inebriated state at the Rogers's rooming house, he had gone to his room and fallen fast asleep.

"Meg and I had had an argument and she was scheduled to fly out early the next morning. She decided to stop by before the flight, kiss and make up ... she threw rocks at my window and called me . . . Believing that I would have awoken if I was there, she rushed away heartbroken because she thought I was 'sleeping' with someone else. She has never fully believed my fervent assurances that I was in a deep, intoxicated sleep. I have never told her that I went with you to a party." But, of course, / had told Meg on the night we met in December, 1973. Perhaps Ted hadn't heard me explain, or perhaps he had forgotten. Ted wrote that he was trying to bring the Christmas spirit into his cell, putting all his Christmas cards on his desk. He had even bought and wrapped presents for his "neighbors." The presents were tins of smoked oysters and Snickers bars. "Now I am attempting the impossible: suggesting all us hardened cons skig carols on Christmas Eve. Thus far, I have been designated a sicko degenerate for such a perverse idea." As far as I caf determine, this Christmas of 1976 would be the last such holiday that Ted and Meg would share, even separated by mesh screens in a visitors' room. And yet, she seemed to be more than a love to him; she seemed to be a life force itself.

"What I feel for Meg is the ultimate omnipresent emotion. I feel her living inside me. I feel her giving me life when

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there is no other reason for it than appreciating the gift of life itself."

Ted enclosed a witness list for the Campbell trial in Colorado, pointing out that many names were misspelled. And he ended his Christmas letter: As for the New Year, it is going to start out so bad that it will have to get better. Perhaps if you put some Chablis in Hawaiian Punch cans and send me a case for the New Year, I can forget the ominous beginnings. But what the hellHappy New Year.

love, ted.

Ted would be leaving Utah for the last time on January 28th, headed for Colorado. He sent me a brief note on the 25th, telling me not to write again until he contacted me from his "new address."

The year ahead-1977-would bring tremendous upheavals in Ted's life, and in mine. I doubt that either of us could have possibly envisioned what lay ahead.

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On January 28, 1977, Ted was removed from the Utah State Prison, spirited by car to Aspen, Colorado, and placed in a cell in the antique Pitkin County Jail. He had a new judicial adversary: District Judge George H. Lohr, but Lohr didn't appear all that tough. After all, he had just sentenced Claudine Longet to a modest thirty days in jail for shooting

"Spider" Sabich. Claudine would begin her sentence in April in the same jail, although her cell would be freshly painted for her and friends would cater in noninstitutional food.

Sheriff Dick Keinast was leery of Bundy and argued that he was an escape risk, because of the escape kit that had been allegedly discovered on him in the Utah prison. He wanted Ted to be handcuffed during his court appearances, but Lohr overruled him and declared that Ted could wear civilian clothing and appear unfettered.

The ancient courthouse which housed the jail had been built in 1887, and offered spartan accommodations, but Ted liked the change from the looming walls of the Utah prison.

When I phoned him in February, I was pleased and surprised to find that the Pitkin County Jail was operated much like the jail under my grandfather's jurisdiction so many years before in Michigan. It was a "Mom and Pop" jail where I called, heard a deputy yell down the hall, and then Ted's voice on the line. He sounded happy, relaxed, and confident.

Throughout hfc eleven-month stay in Colorado, I would speak with Ted frequently by phone. When he would assume more and more of his own defense, he would be allowed free phone privileges to help in preparing his case. Many of these calls, however, would be to me and other friends, and there was seemingly no limit put on the time he spent on long distance calls.

I can remember Bob Keppel and Roger Dunn shaking

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their heads at Ted's nerve combined with his easy access to a phone.

"You aren't gonna believe this," Keppel told me one day when I was in the King County Major Crimes offices. "Guess who called us up?" Of course, it had been Ted, brazenly phoning two of his most dedicated trackers to get information that he wanted for his Colorado defense.

"What did you tell him?" I asked Keppel.

"I told him that I'd be glad to trade information. If he wanted to talk with us, to ask questions, well, we had a couple of questions we'd been wanting to ask him for a long time. He didn't want to discuss our questions though. He was just calling us up as if he were a defense lawyer gathering facts. I can't believe his gall." Ted called me often too. I was awakened many mornings around eight to hear the sound of Ted's voice, calling from Colorado. There were not many letters, but I did get one mailed on February 24th. It was a happy letter. He was enjoying the vacationlike atmosphere of Aspen, even though he was in a jail cell. "I feel super. . . . Feel no pressure from the case. I mean no pressure... . They are beaten." Ted deemed Pitkin County a "Mickey Mouse operation," and he was particularly scornful of Pitkin County District Attorney, Frank Tucker. Tucker was attempting, he wrote, to find areas of commonality between the Colorado killing and the Utah cases, and trying to gain insight into Ted's personality. Ted felt he could see completely through Tucker's case, and that he, the defendant, was a threat to the D.A. because of his self-confidence. "This man should never play poker. And from what I saw of him the other day, this man should never enter a courtroom."

Ted quoted from an interview D.A. Tucker had given about him.

"He (Ted) is the most cocky person I have ever faced. He tells his lawyer what to do. He arrives carrying armloads of books, as if he were an attorney himself. He sends notes to the judge and calls him at night. He refuses to talk to me or any other prosecutor." It was, of course, exactly the image Ted wished to promulgate. "Flattery will get him nowhere. His story touches my heart but someone should tell him I didn't ask to come to

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Colorado. Imagine, the nerve of me telling my attorneys what to do!

Never called a judge at night in my life."

Ted expected that he would get a fair trial in Aspen, and that it would not be difficult to pick an impartial jury in Pitkin County. He encouraged me to come for that trial if I could, and thought that the trial date would be set for sometime in early summer. As I read this letter, this letter where Ted seemed so in control, I remembered the young man who had cried "I want my freedom!" from that first jail cell in Salt Lake County. He was no longer afraid; he had acclimated to his incarceration and he was reveling in the prospect of the fight ahead. The letter closed with, "We are looking at a trial date in late June or early July-God willing and the D.A. doesn't shit in his expensive trousers."

Yes, Ted had changed radically from the outraged, desperate man who wrote to me from jail in Salt Lake City eighteen months before. There was an asperity, a caustic bitterness now. I detected it in his phone calls to me. He hated policemen, prosecutors, the press. It was, perhaps, a natural progression for a man so long behind bars, for a man still proclaiming his innocence. He no longer talked or wrote to me about writing anything himself.

Although he hated the food in the Pitkin County Jail, he rather liked his cellmates and fellow prisoners, mostly drunks and small-time crooks brought in for short stays. He was working hard on his case, and by March he had plans to serve as his own defense lawyer. He was unhappy with the public defender, Chuck Leidner. Having been used to the skill of John O'Connell, he expected more, and public defenders are generally young lawyers, untried, without the experience of the big-time pros, the criminal defense attorneys who charge huge fees. In March, the Colorado Health Department declared that the Pitkin Coui|jy Jail was a short-term facility, and that no prisoner should Le held there for more than thirty days. That produced a prolmem; Ted would have to be moved.

He told me he was reading a good deal, the only respite he had from television soap operas and game shows. His favorite book was Papillon, the story of an impossible prison escape from Devil's Island. "I've read it four times."

Again there was a subtle hint, but it seemed incredible to think that Ted could escape from the Pitkin County Jail,

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deep in the bowels of the old courthouse. And if the case against him was so full of holes-as he proclaimed-why should he escape? The Utah sentence had not been that severe, and it was doubtful that any charges would be forthcoming from Washington State. He could well be free before his thirty-fifth birthday.

Chuck Leidner was still representing Ted as they went into the preliminary hearing on the Caryn Campbell case on April 4th. Aspenites, who'd cut their courtroom gallery teeth on the Longet-Sabich case, jammed the courtroom. Rumor was that the Ted Bundy case might transcend even the histrionics seen earlier in the year. Ted and his attorneys wanted the trial, if there was to be one, held in Aspen; they liked the laid-back atmosphere and, as Ted had told me in his letter, they felt that Aspenites had not yet made up their minds about his guilt or innocence.

Furthermore, D.A. Frank Tucker was under the gun. He had lost Claudine Longet's diary, a diary said to be of utmost importance to the prosecution in her murder case, an intimate journal that had somehow made its way to his home only to be strangely misplaced. Potential jurors in Aspen would remember that. Aware perhaps of his diminishing credibility, Tucker had brought in some manpower from Colorado Springs, two .pros: District Attorneys Milton Blakely and Bob Russell. In a preliminary hearing the prosecution lays out its case before the judge to establish cause to go to trial. Pitkin County's case was hinged-as were Salt Lake County's before it and the Florida cases after it-on an eye witness identification. This time, the eye witness was the woman tourist who had seen the stranger in the corridor of the Wildwood Inn on the night of January 12, 1975.