The cabin is small, rustic and creaky, and looks and smells like only men live here.
Very much a camp, a temporary getaway, this crude, tiny shack is not suited to serve as a permanent residence, but that’s exactly what it has become for these two men on extended retreat from their lives.
When we reach the spare bedroom and I click on the large, old light switch, I’m surprised but not shocked by what I see.
All the furniture, including the bed, has been removed, and the space has been converted into a homicide investigation war room.
The walls are covered with maps and pictures and notes and suspects and images of evidence—all from the Janet Leigh Lester case.
In the center of the room, a single folding chair sits at a single folding table with the murder book and various papers and file folders atop it. Directly next to the murder book on the right side is an open composition book with a blue pen on it, Dad’s small, neat handwriting partially filling the page beneath the pen.
Jake opens his eyes and lifts his head slightly long enough to utter a single-syllable word. “Couch.”
I help him back down the hallway and onto the old slip-covered couch not far from where Dad is asleep in his chair.
Standing upright again, I look down at the two hurting and lost men—one at the middle of his life, the other nearing the end—and consider their plight. Neither has a job or relationship. Their lives are largely devoid of structure, purpose, and meaning—Jake’s perhaps more than Dad’s, especially if Dad’s thrown himself into the Janet Leigh Lester case to the extent it looks like he has—and both men in different and similar ways are adrift.
Dad lets out a small snore, coughs, turns his head a little, and readjusts his body in the chair.
Is he really sick? Dying?
It hasn’t been long since we lost our mother. Are we about to lose our father too?
I have never been as close to my dad as I would have liked. He’s a decent man with lots of friends and the respect of many, but all of his friends are social, casual, of the shallow acquaintance type.
I have far fewer friends, but our connection is much more intimate, personal, deeper.
As good and stable and mostly supportive as Dad has been, he’s always kept me, like everyone in his life as far as I know, a certain distance away. At our closest, we have never been truly close. In those most intimate of moments over the course of our lifetime as father and son, I still felt like they weren’t nearly as intimate as they might have been.
My relationship with my dad has always felt like we were on different sides of the glass partition of a penitentiary visiting booth, a barely visible barrier between us, communicating through plastic telephone receivers. Nothing direct. Nothing too personal.
Like so many men I know, and not an insubstantial number of women, my father seems completely uncomfortable with vulnerability—his own or anyone else’s. This leads to a certain opaqueness and impenetrability of character that makes relating difficult and true intimacy impossible.
Every time I think of this, I’m reminded of what Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic said. The wound is the place where the light enters you.
Without wound, without openness, without vulnerability there is no place for exchange—of light or anything else.
For much of my life, I tried to change the nature of our relating and communicating, something that kept me continually frustrated. Later in life, I found peace through letting go of what I wanted and accepting what is.
Am I about to lose even that?
Deciding not to wake him, I make my way over to the door, feeling excitement and gratitude at being able to crawl into bed next to Anna when I get home.
Easing open the door, I step through it and quietly close it behind me.
I head down the wooden stairs and into the front yard toward my car, but I don’t get very far.
Pulling out my phone, I call Anna.
Still readjusting to marriage and family life, I try to remember to let Anna know where I am and what I’m doing as often as I can, especially given the deception and violation she was subjected to in her previous relationship.
“Hey,” she says, her voice soft and sleepy.
I tell her everything that’s happened and what Jake said about Dad dying.
“Oh John, I’m so sorry. Do you think there’s something to it or was it just drunken Jake-isms?”
“Not sure.”
“Do you need to stay and talk to him?”
“You know that case he’s been asking for my help with?”
“Bundy?”
“I feel like I need to stay and look over it. Do you mind?”
“I’d rather have you here in bed with me,” she says.
Anna is so strong and resilient, I have to remind myself how much she has been through lately. Following the disintegration of her marriage to Chris and learning about all the ways in which he had betrayed her, which were staggering in both breadth and depth, she had experienced extreme physical and psychological trauma while pregnant. She is still healing, still recovering, and I need to be mindful of that at all times.
“And that’s where I’d rather be, but if Dad is dying I feel bad for telling him no.”
“I understand, and if he was awake and you were spending time with him it’d be different, but . . . Do what you need to, I just really rather you not be tired tomorrow,” she says.
Tomorrow we are meant to be meeting her folks at a rented cottage on Mexico Beach for our first vacation as a family and my first vacation in—well, maybe my first ever as an adult.
“Thought the whole point of going on vacation was to rest and relax.”
“Okay. But . . . I’m just really lookin’ forward to this, to getting away together.”
“I know you are,” I say.
“And I know you’re not,” she says. “I just keep thinking somethin’s gonna come up and you’re gonna back out.”
I’m not good at getting away, at vacations, and she knows it. It’s not that I don’t like, enjoy, and need downtime or family time or time alone with Anna. I do. I adore those things. And my approach is to incorporate them into our lives—day in and day out, integrating relaxation and celebration into our ordinary lives, not just during a one-week getaway each year. But I also know it’s important and helpful to actually go to a different location occasionally, and even more important than that, I know how much it means to her, so I’m not going to back out on her tomorrow—no matter what.
“I won’t let it,” I say. “I promise.”
“Thank you.”
“If you really don’t want me staying and taking a look at the book, I’ll—”
“No, it’s okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now go get to work.”
“I’ll be in bed beside you before you know it.”
56
What is it about cold cases?
No matter how old or cold they are. People are still obsessed with solving the Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia, and the Zodiac cases. Two decades later, when little JonBenét Ramsey would be an adult woman in her midtwenties, millions of people are still fascinated, intrigued, even obsessed by her case.
But that’s nothing compared to the utter obsession experienced by the cops who worked the case that went cold.
Why do we become so utterly obsessed with unsolveds?
I’m still actively working both the Atlanta Child Murders and the Stone Cold Killer cases. Decades later and I’m still haunted by them, plagued with solving them.
Unsolved homicides are like demons that can only be exorcised in one way by the cops who worked them. You can solve them and be free, or fail to and remain possessed by them for the rest of your days.
I think of the cold case files on my desk right now. One, the Remington James case, involving the death of several men and one young woman in the river swamp near the o
ther end of Cutoff Island. The other, a series of cops killed with their own guns, one of whom was our current sheriff and my boss Reggie Summer’s predecessor.
I don’t know how many cases haunt my dad—maybe it’s just the ones related to Bundy’s time in the Panhandle or maybe there are others I know nothing of—but now that he’s nearing the end of his life, I understand why he wants to put to rest these ghosts. How much more so, how much more urgent, if he’s sick or dying?
On Valentine’s Day in 1978, while I was obsessed with getting Anna to dance with me at our school’s Valentine’s Day ball, my dad, Jack Jordan, was obsessed with finding Ted Bundy.
Of course, he didn’t know it was Ted Bundy at the time. He didn’t even know he was looking for the same killer in both instances. He only knew he was working two particularly brutal and bloody cases—the Chi Omega Killer in Tallahassee and the Broken Heart Butcher in Marianna.
Valentine’s Day that year was supposed to be the day when Kimberly Diane Leach got to wear her new blue dress to a Valentine’s Day dance of her own in Lakeland, Florida, but on February 9th, the day her parents were going to take her to buy her that blue dress, she went missing from her school in Lake City.
This was a full two years before I would become obsessed with another serial killer, the Atlanta Child Murderer, and I never realized it until now but I learned obsession from my dad.
My obsession with Wayne Williams and the Atlanta Child Murders was in a way a shadow, an investigative echo of my dad’s obsession with Ted Bundy and with the Janet Leigh Lester case.
Pulling the big blue binder of the murder book toward me and flipping to the first page, I look up at the walls covered in case notes. I remember a similar room from a much earlier time.
I still recall Dad coming to my room to talk to me about my grades and how he and Mom thought I should come to live with him for a while, and the look on his face when he saw that my room was covered, much the way this one is, with all the witness statements and police reports and pictures of evidence and crime scene photographs I could get my hands on.
Removing the pen from the blue college-ruled Yoobi composition book, I turn the pages back to the front.
Before I even begin, I do two things—do a quick and cursory review of Ted Bundy on my phone, and make a list of questions I want answered.
One of the most organized, efficient, and sophisticated serial killers to ever operate in the United States, Ted Bundy was a predator unlike any our nation has ever known.
Considered charismatic and handsome by many of his young victims, when Ted Bundy was operating at his horrific best, he would approach young women in public places, either pretending to have an injury or disability or impersonating a law enforcement officer or other authority figure, later overpowering them in or near his car and taking them to a preplanned secluded location for assaults that included rape, sodomy, bludgeoning, strangling, and sometimes even decapitation and necrophilia.
Theodore Robert Bundy was actually born Theodore Robert Cowell. He was born to Eleanor Louise Cowell at Elizabeth Lund Home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont, on November 24, 1946. Though an air force veteran named Lloyd Marshall is listed as the father on Bundy’s birth certificate, the actual identity of his biological father has always been in question. At some point later in life, Ted’s mother claimed that she had been seduced by a sailor named Jack Worthington, but no records of anyone with that name in either the navy or merchant marines has ever been found.
There are those in Bundy’s family who believed that Louise Cowell’s own father Samuel Cowell, a violent, abusive man, may have actually been Bundy’s biological father.
For the first few years of Bundy’s life, he lived with his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, and actually believed they were his parents and that his mother, Louise, was his sister.
In 1951, Louise met Johnny Culpepper Bundy, a cook, at an adult singles night at the First Methodist Church in Tacoma, Washington. When they married later that year, he adopted Ted.
Though Bundy often lied about his early life, he confessed to more than one interviewer and biographer that as a young person he roamed his neighborhood, searching through trash cans and dumpsters for pictures of naked women and detective magazines, crime novels, and any lurid material involving sexual violence, especially ones that involved pictures. Consuming large quantities of alcohol, he also stalked young women, peaking through draped windows to observe them undressing and engaged in other private personal activities.
After graduating high school in 1965, Bundy attended the University of Puget Sound for one year before transferring to the University of Washington. In 1967, he met and became romantically involved with one of his classmates, Stephanie Brooks (not her real name), who later broke things off with Ted and returned to California, fed up with what she described as Bundy’s lack of ambition and immaturity. A critical turning point in his demented development, Bundy was devastated. There is little doubt that Brooks served as a type for Bundy’s victims, who were by and large white females from middle-class backgrounds between ages fifteen and twenty-five, mostly college students who had long dark hair parted in the center. He evidently didn’t approach anyone he’d ever met before. Eventually Ted would reunite with Stephanie Brooks and later become engaged to her for the express purpose of rejecting her the way she had him.
After his relationship ended with Stephanie Brooks, Ted worked a series of minimum-wage jobs and volunteered at the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign. In August 1968, he attended the Republican National Convention in Miami as a Rockefeller delegate. In 1970, he reenrolled at the University of Washington as a psychology major. He became an honor student with a good reputation among his professors. In 1971, he took a job at Seattle’s suicide hotline crisis center, working alongside Ann Rule, a former Seattle police officer and aspiring writer, who would later write a book about Ted titled “The Stranger Beside Me.” Ironically, during the time they worked together, Ted, who Rule described as kind, solicitous, and empathetic, would actually walk Rule to her car at the end of her shift each night to ensure her safety.
After graduating from the University of Washington in 1972, Ted became a rising star in the Republican Party, described as smart, aggressive, and a true believer. In 1973, Ted received a place and enrolled in UPS Law School in spite of a poor score on his admission test, but by 1974 he had begun skipping classes and eventually stopped attending altogether as young women began to disappear in the Pacific Northwest.
Over the next several years, Bundy would perfect his acumen as a predator and serial killer, abducting, raping, and killing young women in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.
Eventually, Bundy would be arrested and tried, but he escaped not once but twice, the second time bringing him to the Panhandle of Florida.
Smart, calculating, and unusually organized, Bundy used his extensive knowledge of law enforcement methodologies to elude authorities for quite an extended time.
He scattered his murders over large geographic areas, and had already killed well over twenty young women before various authorities realized they were hunting for the same man.
Meticulous and exacting, Bundy would explore his surroundings, searching for safe sites to dispose of his victims. His method of assault usually involved brutal blunt-force trauma and strangulation, which were far more quiet methods than firearms and left less evidence behind. Adept at minimizing evidence, he never left a single known fingerprint at any of the crime scenes nor any other evidence directly linking him to the crimes.
Bundy believed himself to be nearly invisible and in many ways he was. His generic, almost anonymous physical features gave him an uncanny ability to alter his appearance. A changeling. A chameleon. Nondescript. Invisible. He hid the distinctive dark mole on his neck by wearing sweaters and turtleneck shirts. Even his preferred vehicle, a Volkswagen Beetle, blended in like few cars could.
Bundy evolved as a
sadist and serial killer over time, his organization and sophistication, his modus operandi, his hunting, his preying, his luring and trapping increasing in effectiveness and proficiency with each passing kill.
Eventually, Bundy would deteriorate, his sick and twisted psyche ultimately leading to his undoing, but before he began his descent, he was horrifyingly good at the very worst things a human being can be.
Having reacquainted myself with Bundy and his background, I remove a sheet of paper from the composition book and make my initial list of questions.
Who killed Janet Leigh Lester? How exactly was it done? When? Where? And where are her remains? Is it even possible that Ted Bundy did it? If so, where did the lines of their lives intersect? Even if it’s possible, did he actually do it? If he didn’t, who did? And how had the killer eluded apprehension all this time?
Questions formed, I dive into the murder book for the answers.
One of the things Harry Bosch taught me early on, something borne out in every experience I had had since—trust the book, the answers are inside.
The keys to solving the case lie within the murder book.
57
The old murder book is flimsy and falling apart, the blue vinyl covering the cardboard beneath splitting and peeling up.
Inside, the first deteriorating document is a typed case summary on a yellowing and brittle piece of paper.
The age and condition of the murder book and the evidence displayed in the room justifies Jake’s derision and underscores the futile nature of such an endeavor—each only making me want to help Dad solve it all the more.
Just before I begin reading, I receive a text from Stevie letting me know he has retrieved the deer from Lake Grove and thanking me for letting him know it was there.
After winning the Miss Valentine pageant on Saturday night, February 11th, the newly crowned beauty queen, Janet Lester, and her boyfriend, Ben Tillman, attended the Sweethearts’ Ball on Sunday night, February 12th, with their friends and classmates of Marianna High School.
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