Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy
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Ted and Ann
The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy
Rebecca Morris
Copyright 2013 True Books/Rebecca True Morris
Excerpts of Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer by Stephen G.
Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth used with permission of the authors.
(Authorlink Press, 2000).
Photograph of Louise Bundy by Russ Carmack used with permission of
The News Tribune.
Photograph of Beverly Burr by Ellen Banner used with permission of
The Seattle Times.
Burr family photos, letters, and poems used with permission of Beverly
Burr.
Holt family photos used with permission of Sandi Holt.
Cover design by Claudia Olsen and BEAUTeBOOK.
True Books logo by Mikel Northcraft.
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the author.
Published by True Books
Seattle, Washington
ISBN: 978-1484925-089
Printed in the United States of America
Praise for Ted and Ann
“This is the ONLY book to read to learn the full story of the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr in August 1961. Fascinating!”
—Ann Rule
New York Times Bestselling Author
“While Ted Bundy might be the greatest evil enigma ever, author Rebecca Morris strips away the layers of the greatest mystery of his life—what was his connection to the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr? This is an astonishing achievement, the missing piece that readers of crime have long sought. Bravo for Morris!”
—Gregg Olsen
New York Times Bestselling Author
“As a journalist, I covered Ted Bundy's murder trial in 1980. Thirty years later, Rebecca Morris brings to vivid life that particular trial and the whole Bundy mystique— when a young, intelligent, charming personality hid one of the vilest hearts that ever beat. This is a chapter in American criminal history that deserves Morris’ confident reporting and writing.”
—Neil Chethik
Author of Father Loss:
How Sons of All Ages Come to
Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads
“Few criminals have loomed as large in the national psyche as Ted Bundy, the ‘Cary Grant of serial killers,’ whose string of brutal murders manages to fascinate and repulse us still. Now, in a book as chilling as it is compelling and impossible to put down, journalist Rebecca Morris presents yet another possible Bundy victim—an innocent, eight-year-old girl who disappeared from her hometown of Tacoma, Washington, in 1961, and was never found. In telling the story of Ann Marie Burr, who went missing on a steamy August day, Morris also reveals startling, never-been-told details about Bundy's childhood, including fresh information about his illegitimacy and brief abandonment by his mother. Morris’ deft writing and detailed research into Bundy's actions that summer, when he was a gangly 14-year-old roaming the Burr's neighborhood on his bike, will have you reading Ted and Ann well into the night.”
—Ginger Adams Otis
Investigative Journalist
Table of Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1 Teddy
2 Thursday, August 31
3 Evening, August 31
4 Ted
Photogragphs and Illustrations I
5 The Weekend
6 145 Days
7 The Birth of the Hunchback
8 One Year Later
9 The Cary Grant of Serial Killers
10 Life Without Ann
Photographs and Illustrations II
Poems by Bev Burr
11 Life On Death Row
12 Bev and Don and Louise and Johnnie
13 The Blue House
14 Explaining Ted
15 What Happened to Ann Marie Burr?
Ted Bundy's Victims
Notes on Sources
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Susan Powell - BONUS CHAPTER
About the Author
Also by the Author
FOR
Beverly Ann Leach Burr
January 4, 1928—September 13, 2008
“Night comes and with it the fear, the listening,
the horror again and again.
Only prayer can lessen the pain as we whisper,
‘Dear God be with Ann. Please help us and other parents like us to be strong.’ ”
Foreword
IT HAS BEEN 50 YEARS SINCE MY BROTHER AND I were startled awake by men shining flashlights on us. It was late August, 1961, a few days before the start of school, and we were sleeping in our fort in the basement one last time. The men were police, and the scene of my parents panic and hysteria that morning is still vivid and haunting.
The tragedy described in Rebecca Morris’ book, Ted and Ann, deeply wounded and altered my life and that of my family and others close to us. As a parent, I cannot fathom having my child taken from my home in the night. The cruelest aspect of this heinous crime is that there have been no answers. Over the years there has been a somewhat regular eruption of rumors, theories, and “confessions.” None led to an answer, and all kept open a wound that never healed.
My parents’ imagination must have run wild with nightmarish visions of what had or was happening to their daughter, and our family struggled to hang on to normalcy. Morris has devoted years to uncovering the details of Ann's disappearance, and the possible link to a well-known psychopath, Ted Bundy. I have learned a great deal about the time period, the facts surrounding the case, and about Ted Bundy and the other suspects in my sister's disappearance from Morris’ thorough research and this book.
Our parents, trying to protect us and provide a happy childhood, shielded us from much of this even through our adult lives.
Morris spent countless hours talking with my mother, who has now passed on, as has my father. In their memory, I applaud Rebecca Morris’ diligent work and skill in telling our story and the story of Ted Bundy, and I hope that it leads to answers so that even now there can be some closure. My parents, Beverly and Donald Burr, showed tremendous strength and courage in carrying on after the abduction of their oldest child. They did it for their other children. They not only managed to hold our family together, but also to nurture friendships, create beauty in their gardens, travel the world, and provide compassion and support to others who were struggling.
I was robbed of my sister, my playmate, and best friend. Some may wonder what good could come from this book if it doesn’t result in answers. My hope is that it shows a family can survive an unthinkable tragedy, by finding good and beauty in life, and that the good outweighs the evil.
—Julie Burr
August, 2011
Prologue
The Day Before
SUMMER ENDED SUDDENLY ON AUGUST 30, 1961. It was the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, and the unusually warm weather turned muggy and the sky threatened to storm. That night, rain drenched Tacoma, Washington. Not the polite, incessant drizzle that those who live in the Pacific Northwest learn to tolerate (or they leave, and many do), but a hard rain accompanied by high winds. Trees blew down, lights went out, and neighborhoods were plunged into blackness. The wind masked any sounds that might be heard inside a h
ouse.
But in the afternoon, before the rain, it was just plain hot. Beverly Burr's steam iron made the day seem even hotter as she worked out the creases in her daughter Ann's new dress. Bev usually made her children's clothes and was so thrifty that the family teased her about it. But Ann was starting third grade, so Bev had splurged and bought the maroon-plaid jumper and butterscotch-colored blouse. Five-year-old Greg had begged for a Superman cape, so she was sewing one, although she was embarrassed for him. He’d find out the hard way on the first day of kindergarten, when none of the other children wore costumes to school.
She hadn’t told her husband that she had bought Ann new school clothes, and she hoped he wouldn’t notice. Bev did a lot of things she didn’t tell Don. At eight-and-a-half, Ann was the eldest of four children. Mother and daughter were a lot alike: smart, independent, and stubborn, with the talent and drive to achieve something creative and remarkable in their lives. Both would be robbed of that opportunity.
During the summer of 1961, Ann often wore a paper lei she had won at the state fair (or it might have been at a function at St. Patrick's, their neighborhood parish). She liked to get up early in the morning and practice the piano. Ann hated to be called Annie, so people quickly learned not to call her that. And she wasn’t known as Ann Marie, which is how the missing poster sent around the world referred to her. Just Ann.
All the children in the immediate neighborhood congregated at the Burrs’. Bev, 33 years old and the mother of four children under the age of eight, didn’t work. Don, who was 35, wouldn’t allow it. Bev loved to have the children at her house. She scoured magazines for games they could play and wrote stories and poems for them. Life at Bev's house could be described as wholesome.
The last children to see Ann were Susie, who lived right across the alley in back of the Burr house, and Christine, who lived a few blocks away. Ann also was good friends with a couple of teenagers, Robert Bruzas and his sister Frannie, who lived two houses east. Ann and Robert had an ongoing flirtation. She called him “lover boy,” and he called her “dear” and said she was “his girl.” Parents didn’t question until later why a 15-year-old boy would want to spend time with an eight-year-old girl.
The children had acquaintances whom Bev didn’t know, children from homes not as wholesome. Bev was naïve about the extent to which all children—hers included—got around by bicycle. Sandi Holt lived a couple of miles west of the Burrs. She was three years older than Ann but knew her. Sandi spent most of her time trailing after her older brother, Doug, and his best friend, Ted Bundy. She looked on when the boys dug tunnels or pulled pranks on other kids, but kept her distance when Ted would douse an animal with gasoline and light it on fire, or when he tried to take small girls into the woods to urinate on them.
North Tacoma was a modest neighborhood, but the houses were nice. The Burrs’, on North 14th Street, just off Alder between Cedar and Junett, was a brick English bungalow built in 1934. Next door was Mrs. Gustafson's orchard, a dense landscape of apple trees and thick rows of raspberry bushes; the children, who called her “Gusty,” knew all the paths between them, as well as every ditch, gulch, and abandoned home in the neighborhood. At the end of Ann's street there were open ditches 30 feet deep, courtesy of a city sewer project. At the college two blocks west, seven new dorms and fraternities were under construction and cement was being poured. The college was hurrying to get as much of the project underway before students began arriving in a few days. Everywhere there were places to play, to hide, and to be a little bit scared.
Later, Bev regretted teaching her children that the world was safe. Like most Tacoma families, she didn’t know that the city's police records were full of reports of (as the police called them) “sex perverts, exhibitionists, sex oddballs, psychos, crackpots, half-wits, queers, and women with lesbian tendencies.”
Ann's father didn’t trust some neighbors, including the woman across the street who had spent time in the insane asylum after she had given birth to a “Negro baby.” Or there was the nudist who liked to sunbathe in his backyard. The neighborhood children visited him because he gave them candy. Because of the confluence of Tacoma's port, railroad, military bases, veteran's hospital, and the insane asylum, Tacoma drew an odd and transient population.
In the summer even more strangers passed through. Just before the Labor Day weekend, neighbors noticed a man in the neighborhood selling cookware, which was strange because he didn’t have any pots and pans with him. The morning paper was filled with news of the Soviet Union and the United States testing nuclear weapons; one man was getting a jump on people's fears, going door-to-door selling plans for basement bomb shelters.
That week the town was laughing about a more lighthearted story in the newspaper. A Tacoma couple was getting divorced, and the event that precipitated the split made the front page of the Tacoma News Tribune. One night at dinner the husband gave his wife an ultimatum: she had to choose between him and her seven cats, which ate at the table with them. She chose the cats.
Tacoma had a moniker it had hoped would fade, “Kidnap Capital of the West.” In 1935, three years after the Lindbergh kidnapping, nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser, son of Washington's timber baron, John Philip Weyerhaeuser, had been grabbed off a Tacoma street in broad daylight. His parents paid a $200,000 ransom, the boy was released unharmed, and an arrest was made within days. Then, two days after Christmas, 1936, a man had broken into the mansion of Tacoma physician William Mattson. The intruder picked up 10-year-old Charles and left a ransom note asking for $28,000. Dr. Mattson tried desperately to follow the kidnappers’ directions through notices in a Seattle newspaper, but communication broke down. Two weeks later the boy's naked body was found on a snow-covered field 60 miles north in Everett. He had been tied up and carried around in the trunk of a car. He died from blows to the head. The Mattson murder was never solved.
Beverly was eight years old when Charles Mattson was kidnapped and killed, an irony not lost on adult Bev, because Ann was eight when she disappeared. Bev and her friends would ride their bikes past the Mattson house. She would point to it and say, “That's where the boy was taken from.”
On the night before Ann disappeared, her friend Susie had dinner at the Burrs’. Ann had two invitations to sleepovers, but Bev said no because school was starting soon.
At 8:30 p.m., the family's bedtime routine began. Greg and Julie, who was seven, went to the basement to spend the night in a fort they had made. Ann had a fungus under a fingernail, so Bev put mercurochrome on it and sent her and her three-year-old sister, Mary, upstairs to bed. Mary had broken her arm on a playground slide and was restless because of the cast on her arm.
Julie was just 14 months younger than Ann, and the girls shared a room. But because Julie was in the basement with Greg and Mary slept across the hall, Ann was alone. She took off her blouse, pedal pushers, and headband and put on the light blue nightgown with the blue and white flowers that Bev had sewn for her. Her doll, Tammy, wore an identical one. Ann never took off the necklace with the images of Jesus and Mary that she had received at her first Holy Communion in May. She also wore a bracelet that had her name, address, and phone number on it, just in case. The other side was engraved: Saint Christopher Protect Us.
Bev was exhausted from the warm weather and hadn’t been sleeping well. For a couple of weeks, both Bev and Don had imagined they heard noises in the yard at night. At about 11 p.m. they locked up. Don put Barney, Ann's coal-black cocker spaniel, on the landing between the kitchen and the back door, and Bev put the chain lock on the front door. A living room window was open a couple of inches, so the wires to the TV antenna on the roof could snake through. It was a new TV, and Don hadn’t found a way yet to accommodate the wires and also keep the window locked.
Late that night, Ann took Mary to their parents’ room. Mary was crying because her cast was itching. Bev said a few reassuring words and told Ann to take Mary back upstairs.
Finally, the family was asleep. Barney
raised a fuss during the night, but they assumed he was barking at the wind. The next afternoon, the front page of the newspaper had a story about the storm. It had rained half an inch and hundreds of people had lost power.
There was also a story about a girl who was missing.
1
Teddy
HE CAREFULLY PLACED THE KNIVES AROUND THE sleeping girl, with the sharp, pointed ends closest to her neck and cheek. He didn’t rush. He was capable of being quiet and patient; he wanted to get it just right.
And then he giggled. His 15-year-old aunt, Julia, awoke, more than a little frightened to find little Teddy lifting the covers and placing butcher knives beside her. Teddy was clearly delighted to have scared her.
When Julia gathered the knives and took them back down to the kitchen, she told her mother about the incident. But no one else in the family thought it was strange. It came back to her years later, after Ted became a suspect in several kidnappings and murders.
The child who would grow up to be a killer of such magnitude that law enforcement had to invent a term for his kind of terror—serial killer—was only three years old, but already he knew the business end of a knife.