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

by Rebecca Morris

  Donald F. Burr also told police about the numerous phone calls he received for the other family. One time the architect's wife answered the phone and heard a man say, “Mrs. Burr, that husband of yours is going to get himself killed. He is a matinee lover, and he better stay away from my wife.” Then the caller hung up. Several other times women called and asked if Burr was going to “come down to the apartment.”

  Donald B. Burr (the one who referred to himself as “just a lunch bucket”) did own some apartments. Bev had never liked Don's side business. Tenants were always coming and going, and he had to spend his weekends making endless repairs. Bev was always a little scared when Don would go to collect the rents.

  Detectives P.P. Schultz and J. Fitzpatrick got a list of Don's former tenants, and decided to pay his current ones a visit. Those visited included Miss Ethel F__, an elderly woman, and Mrs. Georgia N__, who explained that her husband was in the county jail and on his way to the state penitentiary in Walla Walla to serve 20 years for “falsifying a report on food allotment program.” There were a couple of vacancies, and one couple was on an extended vacation to Idaho. There were also a Latvian couple with a young son, and a man separated from his wife. The officers picked up a trustee from the city jail, gave him a large lamp, and had him crawl through a trap door, a cellar, and the attic. There was no sign of Ann.

  All the tenants were concerned over the disappearance of Don's daughter and spoke highly of him. They did recall one incident, though. Don Burr had evicted “a colored family” after their son struck the son of the Latvian couple. Maybe there were some lingering bad feelings toward the landlord? When the detectives asked the elderly woman in apartment A about the episode, she barked that the boy who was slugged had it coming.

  The police also wanted to check out people who had done odd jobs for Don, including a Negro (as African Americans were called in Tacoma in 1961, and sometimes even now) and his 21 or 22-year-old son who had done some painting at the apartment building shortly before Ann disappeared. Bev and Don found it odd that when the son came to their house to pick up his pay a few days later, he knew exactly which alley and driveway to turn into.

  In her quest to try to help the police by giving them names of people to talk to, Bev told them of her suspicions of a neighbor she described as overly polite and insincere. The detectives wrote down the information, smiled to themselves, and dismissed her tip. They had more likely suspects to follow up with.

  Bev, whose only dream was to be a novelist or a journalist, suddenly found her family on the front page of the newspaper. The early afternoon edition of the Tacoma News Tribune featured a small story. It said that eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr, daughter of Donald B. Burr and Beverly Burr, of 3009 North 14th Street, Tacoma, was found missing from her bed early that morning. “She is believed to be a possible victim of amnesia,” the story reported.

  By the second edition, later that same afternoon, a huge headline on the front page proclaimed: “Girl, 8, Vanishes From Home—Chief Hager Calls For Wide Hunt,” accompanied by the photo the family had given police. In the picture, Ann, not usually demure, is standing alone, looking solemn, her hands together in front of her. She is wearing the paper lei, a headband, a blouse with short, puffy sleeves, and pedal pushers.

  Det. Richardson talked to reporters about the parents. He said that Bev and Don had “held up well” until about noon from the strain of their worries. But as the hours passed without any word of Ann, there was increasing indication of apprehension. That may have been when seven-year-old Julie saw her mother hysterical, endlessly searching through kitchen drawers, as if she had misplaced Ann like a serving spoon.

  Everyone in Tacoma wanted to hear from the parents. How was the mother coping after the disappearance of her child? Bev was almost always the parent quoted in articles. She sounded hopeful. “She may show up any minute,” Bev said. “She might have walked outside and got locked out some way. She knew her phone number. If only we would get a call.”

  A gaunt and sad Bev Burr was interviewed by a Seattle television station, which had made a rare trip out of the city, with a huge camera and lights, to record the search on black and white film. “Probably the worst has happened to our little girl. And, uh, I just hope they find her,” Bev told the reporter.

  Bev would second-guess herself—and the police—for the rest of her life. “I should have let her stay with [a neighbor child] that night. Ann was so trusting. It was a big mistake. We taught her everyone was good. We didn’t teach them that people could be bad.” She had her doubts about the police, too. “I always thought they should have set up a roadblock, instead of asking questions, so many questions.”

  Police did not set up a roadblock, maybe because Tacoma had dozens of entrances and exits, by land, sea, and air. There was wilderness to both the east and west, and there was water, a lot of it. Tacoma is on Puget Sound, a body of water with a complex series of islands, inlets, and harbors bounded on the north by Canada and surrounded by two massive mountain ranges, the Olympics and the North Cascades. It would be easy to disappear with a small girl.

  Julie, Greg, and Mary were sent to a neighbor's home for the day, so Bev and Don could speak candidly with police and so they could telephone family members.

  Don's younger brother, Raleigh, and his wife Sharon, arrived from the small town of Grandview, in eastern Washington. Although Raleigh was 12 years younger than Don, they were close. Don, Raleigh, and their sisters had grown up in Grants Pass, Oregon.

  As a teenager, Raleigh had worked for Don and their father, logging in northern California. Raleigh had babysat Ann when she was a newborn while they all lived in tents in the summer. When Ann went missing, Raleigh had to borrow a car from the dealership where he worked to make the long, hot drive over the mountains to Tacoma.

  “There was a lot of police activity,” Raleigh Burr remembered about the day. “They questioned us—where we were from, who we were. There was coffee on the stove. Don was sitting on a couch with his eyes closed. I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t respond. I didn’t see any hysteria. Some people had brought food, probably Bev's church friends or high school friends. I was so sure everything would turn out all right; there must be an explanation.” Other family arrived, too. Jeff Leach was Bev's nephew, her brother Jerry's boy. Jeff was exactly Ann's age. His family often joined the Burrs at Fox Island, where Bev's father owned two small, rustic cabins. After the phone call that Ann was missing, Jeff's family immediately left their home in Seattle for Tacoma. Jeff Leach remembers helping put up the posters with Ann's photo, and the tension and fear in the Burr house. “It terrified me a lot,” he says of his cousin's disappearance. “We didn’t wander too far.”

  After the citizens of Tacoma saw the newspaper stories about Ann Burr, they telephoned the police with tips. Sometimes the calls were about the obvious. Had the police checked the Burr's attic? Were they sure? What about the furnace? Police got calls from a man with a divining rod, offering to help look for Ann. Another said that if he was given a sock of Ann's, he was sure he could trace her. The police considered them “crackpots” but politely took their names, phone numbers, and addresses and checked to see, first, if they were known sex offenders. Then they followed-up on some of the tips. One caller said Ann was in a Portland area hotel with two men and a woman. Tacoma police asked their colleagues in Portland to check it out. Within a surprisingly short period of time—a couple of hours—Portland police called back and claimed to have contacted dozens of hotels. They said they couldn’t find any record of two men, a woman, and a child registered.

  Other residents of Tacoma just appeared at the Burr house wanting to help search. The men found themselves subjected to questioning by police. Criminals, after all, were known to return to the scene of the crime and act like a Good Samaritan, offering to help. The men were taken to police headquarters, questioned about the unusual interest they were taking in the case, and released.

  Many people in the Burr's North Tacoma neig
hborhood reported they had heard or seen prowlers or had found their flower gardens trampled; they could give no details but were usually cooperative when police knocked on their doors, asking to search their homes and basements. The exception was Mrs. S__ of North 13th Street. “Widow, very old, would not let us search house,” Officers Meyer and Burk wrote in their report.

  They visited one neighbor, Dorothy H__, who had arrived home late the night before, the night of the storm, after taking inventory at her bar. As she was doing some wash in the basement, she heard a noise and saw the silhouette of a man's head very close to a kitchen window. She described him as a large person with bushy hair. She screamed and he ran. She called the police and reported the incident. The police log showed that she had called at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 31, just two hours before Ann was found missing.

  Wives called the police to report that their husbands were acting suspiciously and were spending a lot of time under their house for some unknown reason. Mothers gave alibis to unemployed sons who had a record of brushes with the law or had spent time in the insane asylum. Neighbors reported seeing a midget with a beard peeking in windows. Another neighbor regaled the police with stories of how he had first had sex at age six, and had impregnated one girl when he was just nine.

  What police call “sightseer traffic” began. Hundreds of cars drove past the Burr house, slowing as if to look at Christmas decorations or the scene of a traffic accident. The address—printed in every story and every edition of the newspaper—was by now familiar. Just as Bev and her friends had bicycled by the Mattson home as children and never failed to remark on it being the site of a famous kidnapping, so strangers wanted to see for themselves where this one had happened and feel grateful it wasn’t them.

  In the late afternoon, Tacoma Police Chief Don Hager met with Elgin Olrogg of the Tacoma bureau of the FBI. Later, Agent Olrogg told reporters that he was only observing the case. Police Inspector Smith told reporters that “the girl's case has not yet been classed as a kidnaping [sic] as thus far there are no facts to support such a supposition.”

  The FBI observed for days, never putting its experience at kidnappings to use. It released statements explaining that there was no evidence that someone had entered the Burr house, and that it was convinced Ann had probably wandered or run away. Bev called that “absolutely stupid.”

  Detectives Zatkovich and Strand agreed. They had no use for the FBI. “We used to have to tell the FBI, ‘You guys get out of our hair and we’ll solve the case, and then we’ll call you,’” Zatkovich once explained. “They would send two carloads of strangers over from Seattle on every bank robbery, and we had to wait until they got out of here to go to work.”

  A caption on a photograph of Ann published that week in the Tacoma News Tribune bluntly posed this question: “Was Ann Marie the victim of a sex pervert, or was she abducted by someone who wanted a child?” There was no caption or headline that could suggest anything that hadn’t already occurred to Bev and Don. It was easy to imagine the worst.

  Very quickly, the rumors began. Bev had been married before and the child's real father had grabbed Ann. Don used to go by another name when he was logging in California. The couple was hiding something. They weren’t really the girl's parents. They had left their children alone, and see what happens? Bev overheard a woman in a restaurant say, “You know who killed her—the mother.”

  Bev and Don were hurt by the rumors. Plus, the police were stepping up their questioning of Don, asking him pointed questions. So Bev and Don talked it over, asked a relative to stay with the children, and appeared at the police station insisting they wanted to take polygraph tests. The police agreed. Bev was nervous; what if the results made them look suspicious? But the test showed that neither was involved in Ann's disappearance. Bev made sure the newspapers reported it.

  Don couldn’t just sit in the house and wait. He and Raleigh and their eldest brother Barney took a walk in the neighborhood. They were searching for Ann, of course. Raleigh was pleasantly startled when he heard a voice say, “Hi, Uncle Raleigh.” He turned around excitedly. “I thought it was Ann, but it was Greg,” he remembered. The three brothers walked up to the construction sites at the college. When they returned from their walk they made a suggestion to the police that was entered in that day's police report: “Mr. Burr and a couple of his relatives went for a walk this evening, and when they returned said there are several excavation holes in the UPC [sic] area which are full of water several feet deep. Possibly the Public Works Department can be contacted today to pump out those holes in case the missing girl could have fallen in.” They were the same deep ditches where Don had seen the young man with the smirk that morning, kicking dirt back and forth with his foot as he watched the search for Ann. Many years later, when another Tacoma child became famous, Don was certain he recognized the face.

  At 5:20 p.m. Don Burr answered the telephone and heard a young girl's voice say.

  This is Ann Marie Burr ...

  Don swore that's what he heard. But the police, who were nearby and monitoring the calls, were quite certain that the girl did not say her full name. They would never know for certain because the recording machine malfunctioned, and the call was not recorded. But Don believed it was his daughter's voice.

  Eight minutes later the phone rang again. This time Det. Zatkovich answered it and a young girl's voice said.

  This is Ann Marie...

  There was a brief pause, and then the caller hung up. This call was not recorded either. Were they prank calls? Ann never referred to herself as Ann Marie. But maybe a kidnapper had ordered her to say her name, and he thought she was called ‘Ann Marie.’ Wouldn’t a kidnapped child scream for their parent rather than recite their full name?

  When the horrible day came to an end, Bev put the children to bed. It was just like the evening before, but nothing like the evening before. Don put Ann's cocker spaniel Barney on the landing. Detectives stayed in the basement in case the Burrs received a phone call from the kidnapper. Outside, unmarked police cars watched the house. They also watched the house of Mr. D__, the exhibitionist that the police thought liked children and pregnant women a little too much.

  Detectives Zatkovich and Strand wrote in their report that night that... “...extensive questioning of the parents failed to shed any light on the girl's disappearance. Both of them claim that she is an intelligent girl, although quiet; that she has good habits, obeys her parents, goes to bed early, sleeps well; however, she does read occasionally in the evening in bed and, to their knowledge, she has no problem of walking in her sleep or anything of that nature.”

  And then, for the first of hundreds of evenings to come, Detectives Tony Zatkovich and Ted Strand sat in Tony's driveway in their white Chevy, the car they hoped wouldn’t give them away as cops, lit cigarette after cigarette, and talked about how an eight-year-old girl could vanish. Zatkovich wasn’t so sure about Don. He thought he was a little shady, an odd duck, stern. And there were those calls that were made to the wrong Burr house, threatening “the matinee lover.” Strand agreed with his partner that the kidnapper must know Ann, must know the layout of the house, and must have coaxed her outside. At some point they made a bargain to quit smoking. Zatkovich did quit; Strand lasted a few days, then went back to his Camels.

  The Burr house was filled with relatives staying the night. Julie, Greg, and Mary were confused and scared. Julie, just seven, was suddenly the eldest of the children, a responsibility that would weigh on her. Ann wasn’t just Julie's older sister—she was her best friend.

  “I remember being terrified to go upstairs to bed alone,” Julie recalled, “and to get from there to the safety of the main floor where my parents were. I couldn’t stay in the room Ann and I had shared for years, so I moved to an empty room on the other side of the house upstairs, and Mary moved into our room.”

  Bev tried to reassure her children. “They needed me very much, and I had to remember that. They were terrified. They asked, ‘
Will he come and get us, too?’”

  4

  Ted

  TED HELD HIS NOSE. TACOMA STUNK. He had always thought it stunk. He noticed it as soon as they arrived in the city, after his mother cruelly yanked him from his grandfather's house—the only home and the only father-figure he had known—and brought him to this city that smelled. The smell's origin was tidal flats, sulfur emissions from paper mills, and 100 years of chemicals dumped into Commencement Bay, creating one of the most polluted bodies of water in the country. The stink even had a name: the Tacoma Aroma. You tried to get out of its way when the wind was from the east.

  Ted was embarrassed by his family's descent into working-class status and especially by the Nash Rambler his mother and step-father drove. Ted fantasized about being adopted by western actor Roy Rogers (he wouldn’t drive a Nash Rambler). There would be money, and Ted would have his own horse.

  The boy admired his great-uncle John Cowell, whom he and Louise stayed with when they first arrived in Tacoma. John Cowell was as different from his older brother, Samuel, as he could be (except they both married women named Eleanor, which was also their mother's name). Samuel, Ted's grandfather, was the oldest of seven children; John was the youngest. Twenty-three years and a world of differences separated them.

  John Cowell was a music professor at the University of Puget Sound. While living in his home, Ted was introduced to the culture and status he longed for and thought he deserved. But he was just a temporary visitor and had to watch his cousin, a boy just a few months older than he was, thrive in the home Ted thought he should have. If Roy Rogers didn’t adopt him, maybe his great-uncle could.