The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  Crime Commission Assistant Director: October, 1972 to January, 1973. As assistant to the Director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Commission, suggested and did the preliminary investigation for the Commission’s investigations into assaults against women, and “white collar” (economic) crime. Wrote press releases, speeches, and newspaper articles for the Commission. Participated extensively in the planning of the Commission’s activities for 1973.

  Psychiatric Counselor: June, 1972 to September, 1972. Carried a full case-load of twelve clients during a four-month internship in Harborview Hospital’s Outpatient Clinic. Held periodic sessions with clients. Entered progress reports in hospital charts, continually re-evaluated psychiatric diagnoses, and referred clients to physicians for medical and psychotherapeutic medication evaluations. Participated in numerous training sessions conducted by staff psychiatrists.

  Ted went on:

  I apply to law school because my professional and community activities demand daily a knowledge of the law I do not have. Whether I am studying the behavior of criminal offenders, examining bills before the legislature, advocating court reform, or contemplating the creation of my own corporation, I immediately become conscious of my limited understanding of the law. My lifestyle requires that I obtain a knowledge of the law and the ability to practice legal skills. I intend to be my own man, it’s that simple.

  I could go on at great length to explain that the practice of law is a life-long goal, or that I do not have great expectations that a law degree is a guaranty of wealth and prestige. The important factor, however, is that law fulfills a functional need which my daily routine has forced me to recognize.

  I apply to law school because this institution will give me the tools to become a more effective actor in the social role I have defined for myself.

  T.R.B.

  Ted’s personal statement was most erudite and filled with quotes from experts ranging from Freud to the President’s Committee on Law Enforcement, and the Administration of Justice Report. He began with a discussion of violence: You begin with the relation between might and right, and this is the assuredly proper starting point of our inquiry. But, for the term ‘might,’ I would substitute a tougher and more telling word: ‘violence.’ In right and violence, we have today an obvious antinomy.

  He had not softened his position against riots, student insurrections, and anarchy. The law was right. The rest was violence.

  Ted stated his current involvement in a series of studies of jury trials. “Using computer-coded data collected on 11,000 felony cases by the Washington State Criminal Justice Evaluation Project, I am writing programs designed to isolate what I hope to be tentative answers … to questions regarding the management of felony cases.”

  He talked of a study he had undertaken to equate the racial composition of a jury with its effect on the defendant.

  Ted’s thoroughly impressive application to the University of Utah Law School in early 1973 worked, and overshadowed his mediocre Law School Aptitude Test scores. But, oddly, he chose not to enter their law school in the fall of 1973, and the reason given to the dean of admissions was a curious lie.

  He wrote “with sincere regret” a week before classes were to begin that he had been injured severely in an automobile accident and was hospitalized. He explained that he had hoped that he would be physically strong enough to attend the fall quarter, but found he was not able to, apologizing for waiting so long to let the University know and saying he hoped that they could find someone to fill his place.

  In truth, Ted had been in an extremely minor accident, spraining his ankle, had not been hospitalized, and was in perfect condition. He had, however, wrecked Meg’s car. Why he chose not to go to Utah in 1973 remains a mystery.

  There were discrepancies too in his almost flamboyant dossier. Both the study on rape that he told me he was writing and the racial significance in jury composition study were only ideas. He had not actively begun work on either.

  Ted did begin law school in the fall of 1973. He attended the University of Puget Sound in his hometown of Tacoma. He attended night classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, riding from the Rogerses’ rooming house to U.P.S., twenty-six miles south, in a carpool with three other students. After the night classes, he often stopped for a few beers with his carpool members at the Creekwater Tavern.

  Ted may have elected to remain in Washington because he had been awarded a plum political job in April 1973 as assistant to Ross Davis, chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. His $1,000 a month salary was more money than he’d ever made. The “perks” that came with the job were something that a man who had struggled for money and recognition most of his life could revel in: the use of a Select Credit Card issued to the Republican Party, attendance at meetings with the “big boys,” and occasional use of a flashy car. There was statewide travel, with all expenses paid.

  Davis and his wife thought highly of Ted. He ate dinner with their family at least once a week, and often babysat for their children. Davis recalls Ted as “smart, aggressive— exceptionally so, and a believer in the system.”

  Despite his work for the Republican Party, Ted managed to keep up a good grade point average in his night law classes at U.P.S. He continued to live at Freda and Ernst Rogers’s home in the University District in Seattle. Ernst’s health was no better, and, when he had free time, Ted helped to keep the house in repair.

  There had been great upheavals in Ted’s life during 1973, but I had seen him only once during that year—the brief meeting in the Public Safety Building in March. It was that kind of friendship where you touch base with someone rarely, you are pleased to see each other, and they are, at least on the surface, the same people you have always known.

  I saw Ted again in December of 1973—again at a Crisis Clinic Christmas party. It was held at a board member’s house in the Laurelhurst section in Seattle’s north end, and, this time, Ted brought Meg Anders with him, and I met her for the first time.

  In one of those crystalline flashes that float to the surface of memory, I can recall standing in the host’s kitchen, talking to Ted and Meg. Someone had placed a giant bowl of fried chicken wings on the counter, and Ted munched on them as we talked.

  Ted had never described Meg to me. I had heard his detailed recollection of Stephanie Brooks’s beauty, and I had seen his reaction to the tall, dark-haired woman at last year’s party. Meg was nothing like either of them. She seemed very small, very vulnerable, and her long light brown hair overpowered her facial features. Clearly, she adored Ted, and she clung to him, too shy to mingle.

  I commented that Ted and I had attended the last Crisis Clinic Christmas party together, and her face lit up.

  “Really? It was you?”

  I nodded. “I didn’t have a date, and Ted didn’t have a car, so we decided to pool our resources.”

  Meg seemed vastly relieved. I was clearly no threat to her, a nice, middle-aged lady with a bunch of kids. I wondered then why he had let her agonize over it for a whole year when he could easily have explained our friendship to her.

  I spent most of that evening talking with Meg because she seemed so intimidated by the mass of strangers milling around us. She was very intelligent and very nice. But her focus of attention was Ted. When he wandered off into the crowd, her eyes followed him. She was trying very hard to be casual, but for her there was no one else there at all.

  I could understand her feelings only too well. Three months before, I had fallen in love with a man who wasn’t free and would never be free, and I could empathize with Meg’s insecurity. Still, Ted had been with her for four years, and he seemed devoted to her and to Liane. There seemed a good possibility that they might marry one day.

  Seeing Meg and Ted together, I assumed that he had given up his fantasy about Stephanie. I could not have been more wrong. Neither Meg nor I knew that Ted had just spent several days with Stephanie Brooks, that he was, in fact, engaged to Stephanie, and that he was looking forward
to seeing her again within a week.

  Ted’s life was so carefully compartmentalized that he was able to be one person with one woman, and an entirely different man with another. He moved in many circles, and most of his friends and associates knew nothing of the other areas in his life.

  When I said goodbye to Ted and Meg in December 1973, I truly didn’t expect to see him again. Our bond had been through the Crisis Clinic and we were both moving away from that group. I had no way of knowing that Ted Bundy would one day change my life profoundly.

  It would be almost two years before I heard from Ted again, and, when I did, it would be under circumstances that would shock me more than anything ever has, or possibly ever will again.

  6

  MOST OF US have harbored a fantasy wherein we return to confront a lost first love, and, in that reunion, we have become better looking, thinner, richer, utterly desirable— so desirable that our lost love realizes instantly that he has made a terrible mistake. It seldom occurs in real life, but it is a fantasy that helps to relieve the pain of rejection. Ted had tried once, in 1969, to reach out to Stephanie Brooks, to rekindle a seemingly extinguished flame, and it hadn’t worked.

  But, by the late summer of 1973, Ted Bundy had begun to be somebody. He had worked, planned and groomed himself to be the kind of man that he thought Stephanie wanted. Although his relationship with Meg Anders had been a steady and, to Meg, a committed one for four years, Ted had had no one but Stephanie on his mind when he arrived in Sacramento on a business trip for the Washington Republican Party. He contacted Stephanie in San Francisco and she was amazed at the changes four years had wrought in him. Where he had been a boy, uncertain and wavering, with no foreseeable prospects, he was now urbane, smooth, and confident. He was nearing twenty-seven, and he seemed to have become an imposing figure in political circles in Washington State.

  When they went out to dinner, she marveled at his new maturity, the deft manner with which he dealt with the waiter. It was a memorable evening, and when it was over, Stephanie agreed readily to make a trip soon to Seattle to visit him, to talk about what the future might hold for them. He did not mention Meg. He seemed as free to make a commitment as Stephanie was.

  Stephanie flew to Seattle during her vacation in September, and Ted met her at the airport, driving Ross Davis’s car, and whisked her to the University Towers Hotel. He took her to dinner at the Davises’ home. The Davises seemed to approve heartily of her, and she didn’t demur when he introduced her as his fiancée.

  Ted had arranged for a weekend in a condominium at Alpental on Snoqualmie Pass, and, still using Davis’s car, he drove them up to the Cascade Pass, up through the same mountain foothills they’d traversed when they’d gone on skiing trips in their college days. Looking at the luxurious accommodations, she wondered how he had paid for it, but he explained that the condo belonged to a friend of a friend.

  It was an idyllic time. Ted was seriously talking marriage, and Stephanie was listening. She had fallen in love with him, a love that was much stronger than the feeling she’d had for him in their college romance. She was confident that they would be married within the year. She would work to pay his way through law school.

  Back at the Davises’ home, Stephanie and Ted posed for a picture together, smiling, their arms around each other. And then Mrs. Davis drove her to the airport for the flight to San Francisco as Ted had an important political meeting to attend.

  Stephanie flew back to Seattle in December 1973 and spent a few days with Ted in the apartment of a lawyer friend of his who was in Hawaii. Then she went farther north to Vancouver, B.C., to spend Christmas with friends. She was very happy. They would be together again for several days after Christmas and she was sure they could firm up their wedding plans then.

  Even as he introduced me to Meg at the Christmas party, Ted had apparently been marking time until Stephanie returned. During those last days of 1973, Ted wined and dined Stephanie royally. He took her to Tai Tung’s, the Chinese restaurant in the international district where they had eaten during their first courtship. He also took her to Ruby Chow’s, a posh Oriental restaurant run by a Seattle city councilwoman, telling her that Ruby was a good friend of his.

  But something had changed. Ted was evasive about marriage plans. He told her that he’d become involved with another woman, a woman who had had an abortion because of him. “That’s over. But she calls every so often, and I just don’t think it’s going to work out for us.”

  Stephanie was stunned. Ted told her he was trying to “get loose” of this other girl, a girl whose name he never mentioned, but that things were just too complicated. Where he had been so loving and affectionate, he now seemed cold and distant.

  They had such little time to spend together, and yet he left her alone for an entire day while he worked on a “project” at school that she felt sure could have waited. He didn’t buy her anything at all for Christmas, although he showed her an expensive chess set that he’d bought for his lawyer friend. She had bought him an expensive Indian print and a bow tie, but he showed little enthusiasm for her gifts.

  His lovemaking, which had been ardent, had become perfunctory, what she termed a “Mr. Cool” performance, rather than a spontaneous show of passion. In fact, she felt he was no longer attracted to her at all.

  Stephanie wanted to talk about it, to talk about their plans, but Ted’s conversation was a bitter diatribe about his family. He talked about his illegitimacy, stressing over and over that Johnnie Bundy wasn’t his father, wasn’t very bright, and didn’t make much money. He seemed angry at his mother because she had never talked to him about his real father. He was scornful of what he called the “lack of I.Q.” of the whole Bundy clan. The only member of the extended family that he seemed to care about was his grandfather Cowell, but the old man was dead, leaving Ted with no one.

  Something had happened to change Ted’s whole attitude toward her, and Stephanie was a very confused and upset woman when she flew back to California on January 2, 1974. Ted had not even made love to her on their last night together. He had chased after her for six years. Now, he seemed uninterested, almost hostile. She had thought they were engaged, and yet he had acted as if he could hardly wait to be rid of her.

  Back in California she waited for a call or a letter from him, something that might explain his radical change of heart. But there was nothing. Finally, she went to a counselor to try to sort out her own feelings.

  “I don’t think he loves me. It seems as though he just stopped loving me.”

  The counselor suggested that she write to Ted, and she did, saying that she had questions that had to be answered. Ted didn’t answer that letter.

  In mid-February, Stephanie called Ted. She was angry and hurt, and she started to yell at him for dropping her without so much as an explanation. His voice was flat and calm, as he said, “Stephanie, I have no idea what you mean. …”

  Stephanie heard the phone click and the line went dead. At length, she concluded that Ted’s high-power courtship in the latter part of 1973 had been deliberately planned, that he had waited all those years to be in a position where he could make her fall in love with him, just so that he could drop her, reject her, as she had rejected him. In September 1974 she wrote to a friend: “I don’t know what happened. He changed so completely. I escaped by the skin of my teeth. When I think of his cold and calculating manner, I shudder.”

  She was never to have an explanation. She never heard from him again and she married someone else at Christmas 1974.

  7

  DURING DECEMBER 1973 I had participated in a different kind of writing project. I carried many deputy sheriff commissions in my wallet. They had been given to me by various counties around Washington State as a P.R. gesture, and made me more of a “Kentucky Colonel” than a bona fide law officer. I’ll admit I got a kick out of having the badges, but I didn’t do any real law enforcement work. Then on Thursday, December 13, I had been asked to help with an investigation
in Thurston County, sixty miles south of Seattle.

  Sheriff Don Redmond called and asked if I would attend a briefing on a homicide case his county was investigating. “What we want to do, Ann,” he explained, “is fill you in on where we are with the Devine case, get your impressions. Then we need a comprehensive narrative of everything we’ve got so far. It may be rushing you, but we’d like about thirty pages covering the case that we can hand to the prosecuting attorney on Monday morning. Could you do that?”

  I drove to Olympia the next day and met with Sheriff Redmond, Chief Criminal Deputy Dwight Caron, and Detective Sergeant Paul Barclift. We spent the day going over follow-up reports, looking at slides, and reading the medical examiner’s autopsy reports in the case involving the murder of fifteen-year-old Katherine Merry Devine.

  Kathy Devine had vanished from a street corner in Seattle’s north end on November 25. The pretty teenager, who had looked closer to eighteen than fifteen, had last been seen alive hitchhiking. She had told friends that she was running away to Oregon. They had seen her, in fact, get into a pickup truck with a male driver. She had waved goodbye, and then she had disappeared. She never arrived at her Oregon destination.

  On December 6, a couple, hired to clean up litter in McKenny Park near Olympia, had found Kathy’s body. She lay on her face in the sodden forest. She was fully clothed, but her jeans had been slit in the back seam with a sharp instrument from her waist to the crotch. Decomposition was far advanced, due to an unusually warm winter, and ravaging animals had carried away her heart, lungs, and liver.

  The pathologist’s tentative conclusion was that she had been strangled, perhaps had her throat cut. The primary wounds had been to the neck. The condition of her clothing suggested also that she had been sodomized. She had been dead since shortly after she was last seen.