The Stranger Beside Me (37 page)

I phoned Ted and told him that I would be at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles for most of December, and he wished me well. He was seeking funds to pay for an impartial public opinion survey to determine just where-if anyplace-in Colorado he might get an unbiased trial. He suspected that Denver would be the place, a city big enough so that the name "Ted Bundy" didn't ring a bell. His arch enemy, D.A. Frank Tucker of Pitkin County, had been struck down but not through any machinations by Ted himself. Tucker had been indicted by a grand jury on thirteen counts of unlawful use of public funds!

One of the charges against Tucker alleged that he had arranged for a seventeen-year-old girlfriend's abortion and billed the surgery to Garfield County. Others contended that he had made double billings to two separate counties for pleasure junkets he had taken with the young woman. The Rocky Mountain News quoted Tucker's ex-wife as saying she had confronted the beleaguered D.A. with questions about the purported abortion and "he admitted it."

If nothing else, Aspen could be counted on to make headlines. There were Tucker's problems, Claudine Longet-who had taken up with her defense attorney (after neatly separating him from his wife)-and Ted. 250

My trip to Hollywood paled in comparison. I spent my days working with writer-director Martin Davidson and my evenings wandering around the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. I ate supper several times with Adela Rogers St. Johns who also lived in the hotel, and listened to her tales of Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, and William Randolph Hearst, and her shock at hearing that this was the first time I had ever left my children for more than an overnight trip. She found me an overprotective mother. I could now identify more easily with some of Ted's cultural shock as he'd gone from the life of a law student to his existence as a prisoner. I was homesick, wilted by the 90 degree heat, bemused by the pink Santa Clauses skipping past palm trees and roof-high poinsettias, and attempting to learn an entirely new form of writing: movie scripts. Everyone in Hollywood seemed to be under thirty, and I would never see forty again. Just as Ted had, I longed for the sight and sound of rainy Seattle.

A few days before Christmas, I turned in my treatment and the producers liked it. I signed a contract to write the whole movie. They told me it would take six weeks. Could I leave my children that long? I would have to; it was too big an opportunity to turn my back on. I had no way of knowing I would be away from home for seven months. That Christmas was frantic; two days to shop, one day to celebrate, and a week to find babysitters and pack up to return to California. Ted's Christmas was bleak; he had learned on December 23rd that the change of venue he'd requested had been granted-not to Denver but to Colorado Springs, sixty miles south, the El Paso County bailiwick of D.A. Bob Russell who'd been brought in by Tucker to aid in prosecuting him. Three of the six inmates on death row had been sent there by juries in Colorado Springs. It was not a beneficent region for accused killers.

Ted faced Judge Lohr after hearing of the decision and said flatly,

"You're sentencing me to death."

On December 27th, he got better news. Judge Lohr ruled on Bundy's motion to eliminate the death penalty as an alternative penalty in his trial. Lohr became the first judge in Colorado who would find the death penalty unconstitutional. Of course, Ted said he did not expect the final verdict to be

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guilty, but he felt this was a landmark decision for all who opposed the death penalty.

On December 30th, I received a phone call from Ted, a call to wish me Happy New Year, We talked for about twenty minutes. On the surface the only thing unusual about that call was that he seemingly had called only to visit; his calls before had invariably been initiated because he had something on his mind, or he needed a favor done. This call was low-key, companionable, as if he were a friend calling from across town instead of across several states.

He commented that the jail was empty and lonesome; all the short-time prisoners had been released to spend the Christmas holidays with their families, and he was the only prisoner left in the Garfield County Jail. And he complained, as always, about the food.

"The cook took off too-he left everything to be warmed up, and they even warm up the jello. The stuff that's supposed to be hot is cold, and vice versa."

I laughed at his standard lament about the omnipresence of jello-warm jello-in his life. There was so much more unsaid than said; he was less than two weeks away from his murder trial, but there was little I could say that might alleviate the stress connected with that event. It had all been said. I wished him luck and told him that even though I would be in Los Angeles, I would keep in touch. Inwardly I tried to block the picture of what it must be like to be all alone in jail while the rest of the world celebrated the new year.

"I need your address . . . where you'll be in Los Angeles," he said, and I gave it to him, waited while he wrote it down. He wished me luck too, in my new venture, and then "Happy New Year." Ted was saying "goodbye" to me, but there was nothing in his conversation that indicated that. I hung up, troubled, thinking of the holiday season six years before. So much had happened since then and so few of the events of the past half dozen years hadibeen happy for either of us. I mused that it was fortunate ttaat humans have not the power of second sight, that we don't know what lies ahead.

Ted made several other calls on that next-to-last day of 1977: to John Henry Browne, to a reporter in Seattle, a man whom he alternately liked and deprecated. To the reporter, he commented inscrutably that he intended to watch the Washington Huskies in the Rose Bowl game, "but not from

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my cell." I don't know if he called Meg, but I suspect that he called Carole Ann Boone. Carole Ann, who had visited him in his jail cell, who is rumored to have given him a lot of money, who had held his hand and gazed at him with lovejust as so many other women had before her. And then Ted reviewed his plan. He was no longer worried about the upcoming trial; he didn't intend to be there to attend it. He knew the Garfield County Jail better than any jailer did. He knew the habits and peccadilloes of the four jailers better than they did themselves. He'd become adept at charting their movements. His ex-cellmate, Sid Morley, had given him the lay-out of the jail months before, and Ted had memorized every corner and cubbyhole in the building. He had a hacksaw, passed to him by someone whose name he would never reveal; he had long since adopted the prison code that one never

"snitched."

There was a metal plate in the ceiling of his cell, a plate where a light fixture was to be installed. There had been a long delay in getting the electrical work done although electricians were scheduled to complete it within a few days. With his hacksaw, Ted had spent six or eight weeks tediously cutting a 12 X 12 inch square out of the ceiling. He'd cut it so precisely that he could replace it at will . . . and no one had noticed it. At times, he had been away from his cell for two days, and still his "trap door" hadn't been discovered. He'd worked at night, when other prisoners were taking showers, the noise of the drumming water and their shouts drowning out his handiwork. The hole had been limited in diameter by steel reinforcing rods in the ceiling. To allow himself to crawl through that hole, he had dieted down to 140 pounds. His complaints about the jail food were only a cover. During the last two weeks in December, Ted had often wriggled through the ceiling and crawled through the dusty space above him, crawled, in fact, all over the space between the jail's ceiling and the roof above. Each time he returned to his cell there would be the heart-stopping moment when he thought that he'd been discovered, fully expected to find deputies below him "waiting to blow me away." Incredibly, there never were, even though Detective Mike Fisher had warned Sheriff Hogue that he felt in his bones that Ted was getting ready to run. The taciturn Fisher was not a man to cry "Wolf," but no one listened to his warnings.

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Ted was packed, ready to go. All he needed was the right spot and the right time. The ceiling route was the only way. His cell door was made of solid steel, and there were two more locked doors between him and freedom. His knees ached from crawling around on the cinderblocks above his cell. He was looking for the easiest way down, and then, on December 30th, he had found it. A single shaft of light, filled with floating bits of dust, pierced the darkness from below. There was a hole in the plasterboard above a closet in jailer Bob Morrison's apartment. The place was an echo chamber where a pin drop sounded like a crashing rock and Ted had waited, poised, over the hole in the plasterboard. Morrison and his wife were eating dinner; he had heard their conversation clearly. Could they hear him as well?

"Let's go to a movie tonight," Mrs. Morrison said.

"Sure, why not?" the jailer answered.

Ted was paranoid; he suspected it was all a plan to trap him. He knew Morrison had a muzzle loader, could well be waiting to shoot him as he lowered himself through the closet ceiling. He sat there, scarcely breathing for half an hour. He heard the Morrisons put on their coats, heard their front door slam.

It was perfect. All he had to do was drop into their apartment, change clothes, and walk out the front door.

He knew he would have a head start when he went. For the past few weeks he had changed his pattern, telling the jailers he felt ill and couldn't face the thought of eating breakfast. He'd worked on his legal briefs all night and slept late, always leaving his breakfast tray outside his cell undisturbed.

No one ever checked his cell after supper was served. And no one would check it until lunch was served the next day.

Locked in his windowless cell, Ted had no idea what the weather was like outside; he couldn't know that six inches of fresh snow had f^len during the day, adding to the foot already on the ground, and temperatures were well below freezing. If he had? it wouldn't have mattered.

His decision made, Ted returned to his cell, stuffed the legal papers he would need no longer beneath the blanket on his bunk, and looked around his Garfield County jail cell for the last time. Then he was up through the ceiling, replacing the square 254

of ceiling-board, and crawling over to the opening above the closet. He climbed down, fell from a shelf, and found himself in Morrison's bedroom. He shed his jail garb for a pair of blue jeans and a gray turtleneck shirt, some blue tennis shoes. He put Morrison's two working replicas of antique guns-a rifle and a derringer, both muzzle loaders-in the attic, just in case Morrison came back before he left the apartment. And then Ted Bundy walked out the front door into "the beautiful Colorado snowy night."

He found an MG Midget, saw it had studded radial tires. Even though it looked as though it wouldn't make the summit of the pass, it had keys in it.

Ted Bundy drove out of Glenwood Springs. The car blew up on the pass, as he'd expected, but the man who picked him up took him to the bus station in Vail. Ted caught the

4:00 A.M. bus to Denver, arriving at 8:30 A.M.

Back in the jail, a jailer knocked on the door of Ted's cell at 7 A.M. with the breakfast tray. There was no response. He peeked through the door's small window and saw what he assumed was Ted's figure asleep in the bunk.

Jailer Bob Morrison, off duty, went to his closet around 8:15 and took out some clothing; he noticed nothing unusual. In Denver Ted took a cab to the airport and boarded a plane for Chicago; no one even knew he was gone. By 11:00 A.M. he was in downtown Chicago. Lunchtime came in the Garfield County Jail; Ted's breakfast tray, untouched as usual, sat on the floor outside his cell. This time the jailer looked at the lump in the bed and called Ted's name. Still no response. The cell was unlocked, and the jailer let go an oath as he stripped the covers from the bunk. There was nothing underneath but Ted's law reference books and legal papers. They had, indeed, brought him freedombut not in the accepted sense.

There was hell to pay around the Sheriffs office, with recriminations flying right and left. There were cries that the captors had been warned, and that they'd let this man, this man accused of almost a score of murders, walk away.

Undersheriff Robert Hart commented that he doubted that Ted had taken to the mountains this time. "He couldn't take the chill in the hills around Aspen in June, so I don't think he would try it around here in December. We're dealing with a highly intelligent person. He would have this escape worked out thoroughly. Bundy had unlimited use of the telephone.

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He had a credit card to place calls wherever he wanted. And the court ordered us not to listen in on his calls. Hell, he could have called President Carter over in Europe if he was of a mind to do it." Roadblocks were set up, tracking dogs called in again, but the spirit had gone out of the chase; Ted had a seven teenhour headstart on his pursuers.

He was sitting in the club car on the train from Chicago to Ann Arbor, sipping a drink in comfort as the men far behind him called each other names, and waded through snowbanks. . How he would have relished the sight.

In Aspen Ted achieved the status of Billy the Kid at the very least. By God, Bundy had done it; he had made the police look like Keystone Kops! A poet took pen in hand and wrote:

So, let's salute the mighty Bundy Here on Friday, gone on Monday All his roads lead out of town It's hard to keep a good man down. The Aspen State Teacher's College humor magazine, The Clean Sweep, hastened into print with several articles on Bundy: Bundy Bound for Berkeley: Apparently bored by seclusion in the Garfield County Jail, Theodore Bundy decided to leave on New Year's Eve in search of intellectual stimulation and some holiday cheer. Bound for Berkeley, California, he plans to participate in the University atmosphere by both teaching and studying. Called by some the Houdini of prisoners, Bundy will teach courses in escapism, disguise, and also will give an intricate study in what has become known as the Bundy Bread and Water Diet. The intellectual and multitalented Bundy plans to study while attending the University at Berkeley. Hevwill complete his law degree and also take courses in fcoth criminology and theatre so that he can successfully pursue one of several career possibilities. Future avenues include Garfield County Sheriff and the television lead in an updated version of "The Fugitive" series. Rumors of Bundy working as the wine steward at the Bacchanal and opening a light fixture company in Utah have both been proven false.