Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy

by Rebecca Morris

  Later, knives would not be his weapon of choice; instead, he would use his charisma, and tire irons, a crowbar, wooden clubs, a cleaver, panty hose, an ice pick, a hatchet, a lug wrench, a meat tenderizer, a metal bed frame, handcuffs, and his teeth. But at age three, you work with what you’ve got.

  In 1946, when Eleanor Louise Cowell found herself unmarried and pregnant, she traveled to the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. Since 1893, girls in the East had gone to stay at what was first known as the Home for Friendless Women. Louise (still known as Eleanor, until she moved west four years later) must have felt friendless. She was smart and popular in high school, but stayed close to home. She worked as a clerk at an insurance company near Philadelphia and lived in the family home with her parents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, and her two younger sisters. Samuel was a landscaper who owned a nursery in Roxborough, a community in northwest Philadelphia. Louise's mother was a “shadowy figure,” dominated by her husband, suffering from depression and agoraphobia, and institutionalized more than once for shock treatments. She was ill much of her life and wasn’t able to protect her eldest daughter when Louise needed it.

  When Louise was 21 or 22, a coworker introduced her to a man who said he was a veteran of World War II and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He implied there was family money. His name was Jack Worthington. The couple dated briefly, then Jack stopped calling. When she learned she was pregnant, Louise and her family's minister tried to find Jack Worthington. It was a dead end; Jack Worthington had never attended the University of Pennsylvania, and he didn’t have the well-paying job he said he had. He either vanished, or hadn’t existed. That is the story that was told for years. There was a rumor that the father of Louise's baby was really an older, married member of her church. And there was a more sinister explanation for her pregnancy; maybe the reason why her father never “took off” after Jack Worthington, why he insisted on bringing the baby back to Philadelphia, and why Louise remained ambivalent even late in her life about keeping the boy, was that Samuel Cowell was the father. Louise is the only one who knows who Ted's father was, and beyond her tale of the mysterious Jack Worthington, she has never told.

  Author Ann Rule, who knew Ted from his college years to the end of his life, always doubted the story of the vanishing birth father. “She never had a boyfriend, and suddenly she is pregnant?” Rule asked skeptically. She believes Ted's grandfather was his father, and that's why the baby was left at the Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Vermont for his first few months. “The first woman in his life had lied and betrayed him,” Rule said of the sense of abandonment Ted would experience his whole life.

  The Cowell family was good at pretending problems didn’t exist, but it was hard to hide Louise's pregnancy. She was president of the young people's group at her church until word got around that she was pregnant; then she was asked not to attend. As her pregnancy advanced, and her mother was too ill to accompany her to Burlington and her sister too young, the minister's wife made the journey with her. Two months later, on November 24, 1946, Louise gave birth to Theodore Robert Cowell. He weighed seven pounds, nine ounces, and the most his mother ever said about his birth was “there were no complications.”

  She went home alone, leaving her baby son with no mother to bond with, which child-development experts say is critical in the first few months of life. It was her father who insisted they retrieve him. Polly Nelson, a pro bono attorney who worked for three years to halt Ted Bundy's execution, believes Ted's mother had made her decision when she left Vermont and that she never intended to keep Ted. Her father was “stern and scary. He insisted Louise not put Ted up for adoption,” Nelson said. “Three months alone in an orphanage; that's about as traumatic as it gets. Louise always seemed ambivalent. My impression is she never changed her mind about putting him up for adoption.” Early in 1947, Louise returned to Vermont and collected the baby. They called him Teddy.

  It was his first abandonment. Ted Bundy, who would have three names by the age of five, who would never know who his father was, who likely saw his beloved grandfather swing cats, kick dogs, and rage at his wife and daughters, would for his relatively short life feel a loneliness and a void that couldn’t be filled. Until he learned he could fill it by bludgeoning, raping, strangling, biting, and beheading young women.

  When it came to the story of Ted's conception, the family was secretive. His grandparents told some people—even family—that they had adopted a baby, but Teddy's great-aunt Virginia Bristol was skeptical. “When I heard Louise was ‘not home’ I knew things were not right. Next thing I heard was that Sam and Eleanor had adopted a boy,” Bristol remembered years later. “I was smart enough to know damn well they weren’t adopting this baby. No adoption agency would’ve given them one; Eleanor wasn’t well enough to take care of one! I knew it had to be Louise's baby. But they wanted to cover up. All we ever got was evasions. I had a very secretive brother.”

  Others in the family were also skeptical of the “Jack Worthington” story but didn’t dare discuss it; Samuel Cowell flew into a violent rage whenever the subject of Ted's paternity came up.

  Ted told many versions of his parentage. He told some people that for years he believed his grandparents were his birth parents, and that Louise was his sister. At other times he said he always knew she was his mother. After Ted was arrested for murder, one of his teachers at Woodrow Wilson High School said that when Ted found out he was illegitimate, he “snapped.” When he was in college he told a friend that it wasn’t until a cousin teased him that he learned he was illegitimate.

  He sobbed when he told a girlfriend what he knew of his birth, and he could appear resentful and ashamed of his mother. But other times he seemed to accept his illegitimacy with benign curiosity. Whether he was the product of incest, or a brief tryst with Jack Worthington or a family friend, could Ted's rage at his mother and exposure to violent and disturbing behavior under his grandparents’ roof explain why Ted Bundy could commit such atrocious crimes against young women?

  The stories related by Louise's sisters and her aunts and uncles—Samuel's own daughters and siblings—have a gothic quality. Samuel had a stash of pornography that the very young Teddy must have seen, perhaps the kind that featured bondage and murder; Samuel was cruel to animals; Samuel raged at his employees; Samuel was a bully. Samuel's own brothers feared him and wished him dead; Samuel was “an extremely violent and frightening individual.”

  The youngest daughter described her father as a tyrant. Julia was just 12 years old when Louise came home with the baby (in a few years, Julia would be the teenager Teddy loved to scare with knives). She said that her father was so angry when she overslept one morning, and she was so afraid of him, that when he pulled her out of bed she stumbled and fell down a short flight of stairs. Samuel's sister said she always thought her brother was “crazy.” Maybe young Teddy was the only person in Samuel Cowell's household who was not subjected to his verbal and physical abuse. Ted had only pleasant memories of those years, but it's not uncommon for adults, especially killers, to repress early memories of abuse, whether witnessed or experienced.

  Ted told his longtime college girlfriend that he was disciplined harshly as a child but told others it amounted to nothing more than spanking. He also told the girlfriend that he avoided the draft during the Vietnam War because he had broken an ankle “when he was back east” and it had never healed right. “Back east” was his first four years, living at his grandfather's. Ted said he worshipped his grandfather, but he told a psychiatrist that Samuel Cowell was a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews. Ted confirmed that his grandfather tortured animals and kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse.

  Julia described her older sister Louise as being much like their father—temperamental, secretive, and undemonstrative. The family was good at denial. Louise remained adamant that her son could not be guilty of killing dozens of women. After he was executed, she continue
d to refer to his crimes as “those things” or “those terrible things.”

  Louise shrugged off questions about her father's abusiveness and what Teddy may have witnessed. It was only near the end of Ted's life that his mother revealed one family secret. Polly Nelson and psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis were trying to stop Ted's execution; they believed that he had sabotaged his trials and that abuse he either experienced or witnessed as a child should have been part of his defense. But Ted and his mother were not forthcoming about his childhood—until it was too late. As Nelson wrote, “Ted's mother, Louise, thinking that it was really her final chance to say something that could save Ted, called me at the hotel to admit that her father had been violent and probably had beat her mother. It was clearly a very, very difficult thing for her to say.”

  Dr. Lewis was not surprised. It confirmed what she knew about the childhoods of serial killers: their families would rather their loved ones die than reveal ugly secrets that might save them from the electric chair.

  A professor of psychiatry at Yale and New York University, Dr. Lewis was studying juveniles on death row in the maximum-security Florida prison where Ted was housed. His attorneys asked if she would evaluate him. She says Ted told her about his “terrible depressions.” She concluded that he fit other criteria she had formulated about people who murder. “Killers—not just serial killers—have been hideously abused as children,” Dr. Lewis said. “What we have found is early, ongoing abuse, and a combination of other factors, including brain damage. Neurologists were saying there is no relationship [between brain damage and violence] but there is.” Lewis's critics say she is sympathetic to killers. But the theory she was documenting in the 1980s—that serial killers show signs of childhood abuse, mental illness (in Ted's case, bipolar disorder), and brain damage—has gained credibility. The brains of killers are different from those of average adults.

  Whatever the cause, Ted had been damaged emotionally. After a series of tests were performed on Ted in 1986, in preparation for another legal appeal, a psychologist concluded that Ted lacked “any core experience of care and nurturance or early emotional sustenance. Severe rejection experiences have seriously warped his personality development and led to deep denial or repression of any basic needs for affection. Severe early deprivation has led to a poor ability to relate to or understand other people.”

  We learn attachment from our mothers, and the cruelest deprivation is when we don’t learn how to bond with others. Factors which cause a separation from a mother—including an unwanted pregnancy, being given up for adoption, or physical, emotional, or sexual abuse—lessen a child's sense of security. Children who become adults with attachment disorder have difficulty forming lasting relationships and never learn to trust.

  Dr. Lewis calls the incident of three-year-old Teddy putting the knives beside his teenage aunt “extraordinarily bizarre behavior” for a toddler. “It's the kind of behavior that, to the best of my knowledge, you only see in youngsters who have themselves been seriously traumatized, who have either themselves been the victims of extraordinary abuse, or who have witnessed extreme violence among family members,” she said.

  Some of Ted Bundy's final words were about his childhood and his interest in the macabre. During his last hours he asked to see Dr. Lewis. He told her of how “very, very early” he had been fascinated with murder.

  It might have been the incident with the knives. Something was the proverbial last straw as far as life at Teddy's grandparents’ house. Something scared Louise's sisters and her aunt. Ted's great-aunt Virginia paid to send Louise and Teddy to the home of another brother, in Tacoma, probably to protect them, but from whom or what? Virginia explained it this way: “We felt Louise had to be rescued.” Although she was moving thousands of miles away, Louise decided to drop her first name, Eleanor, and be known by her middle name, Louise. She also changed her last name and Teddy's to Nelson to pass herself off as a widow or divorcee.

  But the move west came too late. Whatever had shaped Teddy had left its mark. Teddy was missing something, and it was more than a father, a mother who wanted him, or a home without mental illness and violence. He was missing empathy. He was missing an ability to form emotional bonds. He was missing a conscience.

  2

  Thursday, August 31

  ANN WAS GONE.

  It was early morning, about 5:15 a.m., and Beverly Burr had startled a neighbor by knocking on the front door.

  Bev was in her bathrobe, and, as would often happen, she had forgotten she had bobby pins in her hair. She had awakened a few minutes before, checked on her children, and found Ann missing, the front door standing open, and the living room window open wider than usual. She hurried outside and searched the yard. As she walked around the house, she saw that a garden bench—the one she had stolen from an Indian reservation during a summer trip—had been moved from the back of the house near the garage to underneath the window on the west side of the house. That's when Bev began knocking on doors.

  Some people tried to get Bev to come inside. Although it would be another warm day, it had just stopped raining, and the ground was wet. Oblivious to the dampness, Bev anxiously kept saying, “Ann is gone. Have you seen Ann?” They all said no, Ann wasn’t there. Bev peered around them to see for herself.

  Two houses east, Alice Bruzas was getting into her car. Many mornings Alice drove her eldest son, William, to his job as a psychiatric aide at the veteran's hospital. Alice's teenagers—13-year-old Frannie and 15-year-old Robert— were friendly with Ann.

  Alice paused, letting Bev tell the story about Ann being missing, and then went upstairs and woke Frannie to see if she knew where Ann was. Frannie didn’t. Although Frannie was five years older than Ann, they were occasional playmates. Frannie was too old for the dolls that Ann liked, but both girls had canaries and would get together at one house or the other to play with their birds. The families belonged to the same Catholic parish.

  Alice seemed unconcerned about Ann being missing, and she hurried Bev away. Robert and Frannie thought of their mother as naively optimistic; she always, always, thought Ann would be found.

  According to the police report, the first call to the Tacoma Police Department was made by Mrs. Donald B. Burr at 5:30 a.m. The dispatcher wrote that Ann Burr, age eight-and-a-half, had “taken off” in her night clothes.

  Bev woke up Don and said she couldn’t find Ann. They dressed quickly. Within a few minutes, two Tacoma police officers were at their door. Roland Otis, 25 years old, had been on the Tacoma police force three years and was assigned to juvenile cases. Like many of the men in the department, Otis grew up in Tacoma's north end.

  It had been a busy evening for Otis and his partner, Leroy Bush. During the storm, they had come across the cause of the power outage. After a long dry spell, the heavy rain had knocked down a pole that snapped a power line at South 25th and Hosmer Street and started a fire. After reporting the fire to City Light crews, the policemen were ending their shift when they were dispatched to follow up on a report of a missing girl from 3009 North 14th Street.

  As the rookie officers entered, they took a quick look around the house. The dining room was on the immediate right and the living room—the room with the window kept ajar for the TV antenna—on the left, the western most end of the house. To the rear of the dining room was a kitchen and breakfast nook. Bev and Don's bedroom was at the back on the main floor. A carpeted stairway in the center of the house led to the children's rooms on the second floor. Ann and Julie shared the front bedroom above the dining room. Mary's room was across the hall, and Greg's was above his parents’ room. There was a spare room across from Greg's.

  Bev told the police that Julie and Greg had slept in the basement the night before, how Mary and Ann had been up at least once in the middle of the night, and how she had found the window raised and the front door standing open, unlocked from the inside. The Burrs always locked the door at night, and the safety chain was always set. Bev and Don slept w
ith their bedroom door open in case the children needed them.

  The parents were worried. Officers Otis and Bush called the station to let the higher-ups know there was no trace of the girl. “This may not be just a missing girl,” one of them told headquarters. As soon as more police officers arrived, Otis and Bush were sent to search the neighborhood. Among the residents they stopped to speak to was Yvonne Doherty, the mother of seven children. She was hanging wet laundry on the clothesline in the yard of her house, at 15th and Prospect, when the patrol car stopped. “They asked if I had seen a young girl,” Doherty remembered. “I hadn’t, and then I heard about it on the news.” She would become one of Bev's closest acquaintances.

  The officers drove and drove, looking for a small, golden-haired girl in a blue and white flowered nightgown.

  Other police officers began going door to door, waking neighbors and asking if they had seen Ann or anyone in the neighborhood who “didn’t belong” there. They asked permission to enter the homes and search from attic to basement.

  Don got into one of the patrol cars, and he and the officer drove around the University of Puget Sound campus, a popular playground of children in the neighborhood. They didn’t see Ann, but for the rest of his life Don would remember a young man he saw at one end of a deep pit. It was still too early for a crew to be at the excavation site, but the young man—he might have been a teenager— was stamping his feet in the dirt which the rain had turned to mud. He looked right at Don.

  It was 6:45 a.m. when detectives Tony Zatkovich and Ted Strand arrived. The two men were handsome in a Hollywood B movie kind of way. Zatkovich looked like a boxer, with a square jaw and a nose that had gone a few rounds. Strand was dapper, with prematurely-gray hair and glasses. Bev thought he looked like a “courtly gentleman.” The pair was famous for being members of Tacoma's vigilante police, a group of officers who in the 1940s went outside the police department to clean up corruption in the city. That's when Tacoma was known as “Seattle's dirty back yard,” a “dirty city with dirty politics.”