Cowell drove exotic European cars, which turned heads in Tacoma. After living and performing in Europe, he had a French Simca shipped home, and later he drove a Peugeot. “I know he was enamored of our family, he romanticized it,” Ted's cousin Edna Cowell Martin said. There was a lot to romanticize. Her father wasn’t just a music teacher; he was a noted composer and performer. He’d been a piano prodigy at age six, won a scholarship to The Juilliard School as a teenager, been a student of Aaron Copland's at Tanglewood, earned his graduate degree at the Yale School of Music, performed at Carnegie Hall, and was friends with Leonard Bernstein.
In addition to riding in a Simca and a Peugeot, Edna and her older brother John (the cousin Ted envied), went to private schools in Europe and Seattle. The Cowells had a beach house near Longbranch, on a peninsula west of Tacoma. Edna remembers the Bundy family arriving for a visit, all crowded into the Nash Rambler.
The Cowells were educated, well-traveled, and classy, but they weren’t wealthy. When Louise and Teddy arrived in Tacoma in 1951, the Cowells were living in a modest house on Alder, just two blocks from 3009 North 14th, where Don and Bev Burr moved their growing family in 1955. By then, Ted and his mother, step-father, and Ted's young half-siblings were living on South Sheridan, still in North Tacoma. Later they moved to N. Skyline Drive, not far from the suspension bridge across Puget Sound connecting Tacoma to the Kitsap Peninsula. The Cowells, meanwhile, had moved to N. Puget Sound Avenue, still near the university, and Ted would ride his bicycle back and forth. Despite Ted's jealousy, he and his cousin John Jr. were good friends. But by the time he was a young teenager, Ted was spending a lot of time alone. He liked to roam on his bike. He liked alleys, and there were alleys everywhere in his former neighborhood in North Tacoma.
Ted felt his mother married beneath herself. She came from a family that produced a musician, a college president, and successful business owners. They were from the east, and while the east had more than its share of towns that smelled, Ted didn’t remember them. Ted had always been proud of how his mother had excelled in high school, how involved she had been in school activities, and how well-liked she was. That was all before Jack Worthington or whatever his name was.
When Ted and his mother first arrived in Tacoma, Louise found an office job, and not long after she went to a church social at Tacoma's First Methodist Church, the same denomination that had asked her to leave the young adults group when her pregnancy came to its attention. But that was back in Pennsylvania, and now she had a new identity. It was never quite clear if this young woman was gamely raising her younger brother or a son whose father had died tragically in the war, or even worse, abandoned her. She was now Louise Nelson, and her son was Teddy Nelson.
At the church she met John Culpepper Bundy, called Johnnie, a soft-spoken Southerner who had been a cook on several large ships during World War II. He was from North Carolina, and one of 12 children. He was cooking at a military hospital near Tacoma when he met Louise. They married just a few months after meeting in 1951, and Louise soon gave birth to a girl, then a boy, then another girl, then another boy, and almost overnight Ted had not only lost his grandfather, he had lost his mother to Johnnie and to four young half-siblings. His tenuous and confusing connection to Louise became even more fragile. For a boy who felt deprived and abandoned, it was enough to make him mad. In the final hours of his life, he would express confusion over the anger he felt toward his mother.
From a young age, Ted was a snob. Johnnie wasn’t good enough for his mother. Tacoma couldn’t compare with the east coast, and it seemed to always lose out when compared with Seattle. It's often said that the distance between Seattle and Tacoma is a lot more than 30 miles. Of the two cities, Tacoma should have become the bigger and more prosperous. It was the Pacific terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad beginning in 1873. Tacoma's Commencement Bay is a better harbor than Seattle's Elliott Bay. Tacoma had strong unions and, as Rudyard Kipling wrote while passing through in 1889, Tacoma was “literally staggering under a boom of the boomiest.” A fire started by boiling glue at a cabinet-making shop had recently destroyed the entire downtown of Seattle, helping to level the playing field a little. Tacoma could, for once, lord its success with its port and logging over Seattle, which was now just “a horrible black smudge.”
That changed again when gold was discovered along the Klondike River in Alaska, in 1896. Seattle became the “Gateway to the Gold Fields,” the jumping off point for thousands of prospectors headed to the Yukon Territory. It was Seattle merchants who equipped them for their trip.
By the early 1960s, the city where Bev Burr had spent her entire life and where Ted Bundy was uprooted to, had started a long decline. Within a few years, the birthplace of Bing Crosby, the city where Frank and Ethel Mars stirred their chocolate, and where Nalley's perfected its pickles, would be characterized by its own mayor as looking “bombed out” like “downtown Beirut.” As the journalist and historian Murray Morgan wrote, “Tacoma's struggle... had become not to surpass Seattle but to survive as something other than suburb or satellite to the metropolis, to remain a community with a distinct economic base and personality.” One of the detective magazines put it a little less elegantly in a headline: “Beneath the snowcapped peak of Mount Rainier lies a boiling cesspool.”
Instead of being adopted by his great-uncle, Teddy was adopted by Johnnie. Now the boy had the third name of his young life. But Ted and Johnnie never formed a strong bond. Ted's friends remember when he stopped calling Johnnie “Dad” and started to call him by his name, or not refer to him at all. Ted didn’t want to be pals with Johnnie.
Ted was embarrassed that Johnnie, a diminutive man, had no higher aspirations than to spend his life as a cook at a military hospital. Johnnie was good-hearted and entertained people with stories about making “scrambled eggs for five hundred people and cars that broke down.” In Ted's eyes, Johnnie was a redneck. But Ted was special. Ted skied. Ted was going to college.
As a child, Ted was capable of throwing tantrums; he admitted as an adult that it was probably because he was jealous about losing his mother to Johnnie. And there was anger close to the surface. Ted's elementary school report cards had As and Bs but a teacher's note pointed out that Ted needed help controlling his temper. In photos with his best friend Doug Holt and Doug's sister Sandi, Ted has clenched fists—even at his friend's birthday party. Sandi says Ted's hands often formed fists, and that he could sock another child, even his friends, with no warning.
From a young age, Ted liked to sneak out of the house. Because it got hot in the upstairs of their house, Sandi and Doug Holt spent every summer night in a tent in their backyard on North Howard Street, about a block from Ted's. Ted would appear and spend a few hours in the tent with them. He wouldn’t sleep there, but the three would try and identify the constellations in the Tacoma sky, and the boys would discuss their latest game of “getting over.” They liked to trick people, put something over on them, and of course, not get caught. There were incidents only his youngest childhood friends knew of. Sandi Holt, who as a child followed Ted and Doug everywhere, is convinced her father sexually molested Ted.
C__ Holt was a highly decorated World War II radio operator who flew dozens of combat missions. After the Army, he had a career at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington. On a Boy Scout camping trip one summer, the other troop members—including Doug—caught Ted and C__ Holt undressed in the middle of the day in one of the tents. Maybe they were drying off after swimming, maybe not. But it was apparent that something had been going on—and it wasn’t innocent. Doug believed that something definitely “kinky” had happened between his father and Ted, that the two were a little too “buddy-buddy.” The other boys teased Ted; that may have been the outing when Ted hit a fellow Scout member over the head with a stick. The father of one of the other boys berated C__ Holt for being in the tent with Ted, but beyond that there were no repercussions for Holt. Ted abruptly stopped going on Boy Scout camping
trips but wouldn’t explain why.
Sandi and Doug were well aware of their father's ability to abuse children. He sexually molested them all of their childhood.
Ted was having trouble controlling his compulsion to “creep around in the darkness.” Sandi says she saw Ted use his pocket knife to cut open animals, douse them with gasoline, and set them on fire. He and Doug also used knives to slash the leather seats in expensive cars in the neighborhood. Ted would try to “pants” young girls, luring them into the woods, pulling down their pants, and urinating on them. Doug Holt was a little smaller than Ted, but he hit his best friend when Ted tried to drag Sandi into the woods. Sandi Holt never forgot the dark look that could overtake Ted, how the color of his irises changed, how she could suddenly be scared of her brother's best friend.
Ted's early abuse of animals was textbook. He was imitating his grandfather, and it was a rehearsal for later violence, a way to practice before moving on to killing women. It also served as a release from his depression, a mood enhancement, and was a symptom of his attachment disorder. From childhood, Ted fit another psychological model: he had quantities of fearlessness and aggression, which are signs of a lack of empathy.
The North Skyline area was a neighborhood of modest homes and families with modest means surrounded by wealthier neighborhoods. According to Sandi Holt, Ted was jealous of his peers, the children of doctors and lawyers. His rage at someone or something was building. As a young teenager—when his friends were beginning to date—Ted was seeking out pornography and reading about gruesome crimes. “He was extremely lonely,” attorney Polly Nelson explained. “He was wandering alone all the time, to stay out of the house, going through garbage cans looking for porn.”
And he found some, whether it was in garbage cans, or, as he told his friend Jerry Bullat, right in plain sight on a Tacoma sidewalk. For six years, from seventh grade at Hunt Junior High School until they graduated from Wilson High School, class of ’65, Ted sat behind Bullat in homeroom. Since they were thrown together alphabetically in class and in yearbooks, the two boys formed a friendship based on their shared love of skiing, especially night skiing at Snoqualmie Pass, 65 miles east of Tacoma.
One day, Ted took Bullat aside at school to show him a photo. It was old, it was black and white, and Bullat was shocked: it was a photo of a man and a woman having oral sex. Ted said he found it on the sidewalk, but Sandi Holt says Ted had discovered that her father—Ted's abuser—hid his porn outside, in a bag under grass clippings.
Bullat doesn’t remember Ted ever mentioning the ankle that was broken as a child. It didn’t seem to slow down his skiing or participation in track and field at Hunt Junior High. Bullat recalls Ted having more freedom than he did. “It seemed like he didn’t have a lot of the restrictions,” he said. Ted didn’t seem to spend much time at home. He had some skiing buddies, or friends in Scouts or the church youth group, but they weren’t invited to Ted's house. There was no hanging out in his room, which was in the basement of the North Skyline Drive home.
As a child, Ted had thrown tantrums because he was competing for his mother's now very divided attention. As a teenager, he had impulsive outbursts. Jerry Bullat still found Ted humorous and for the most part, good company on ski trips. Ted would pretend to have a British accent. Bullat thought he was trying to sound like “a New England elitist.” “He always seemed a little more intense than the average guy,” Bullat remembered. But he was a loner when it came to girls. By one account he was voted “shyest” in junior high school. He stuttered, although some childhood friends remember it as more, as a “horrible speech impediment.” He was both a loner and a gregarious cut-up. He didn’t date, but invited a popular girl to the prom. In fact, he seemed, even to his friends, a contradiction. He seemed to have more than one personality.
Ted was clever. On a ski trip during their junior year, he accidentally ran into a woman on a run. That spring, in Bullat's yearbook, Ted drew a line sketch of a downhill skier and wrote, “Stien strikes again. From one great skier to another. We’ve got one more year to wipe them old ladies of [sic] the ski slope.” Ted signed his sketch Theodore Stien Ydnub. Ted was referring to the Norwegian Olympic skier, Stein Ericksen, but misspelled Stein. Ydnub is—of course—Bundy spelled backwards.
He was an average student, but he was very good at some things, including stealing. After one trip to the mountains, he pulled into his parents’ garage, forgetting the skis on the roof of his car (it wasn’t the only time Ted would ruin skis driving in or out of a garage). They broke, and Ted was furious. But within days, he had completely new gear, the expensive stuff. Bullat was sure it was stolen. “He was a thief, he was resourceful,” Bullat explained. Ted had no money, and Jerry was used to having to pay for everything when he and Ted were on a jaunt.
They would take Ted's car or the Wilson High School ski bus. Bullat would pay Ted's way. In return, Ted tutored Bullat in American Government. Bullat knew Ted was getting the better deal. “My parents always said I was gullible,” he said. One of Ted's scams was making fake lift tickets for the ski slopes. Doug was terrible at shoplifting and always got caught, according to his sister Sandi, but Ted didn’t get caught and would boast of sneaking into houses in the neighborhood and lifting money or items. Doug and Ted drifted apart during their high school years. Doug got into martial arts and body building; Ted's favorite pastimes were skiing and stealing.
From his earliest thefts—and there would be a lot of them over the years—Ted felt no remorse, no guilt, no nagging sense of responsibility, and no fear that he would be caught. Ted just didn’t think like that. His brain didn’t work that way. He did get caught a time or two. He was fired from a hotel for stealing from employee lockers. All his life Ted would steal cash because he always needed it (he seemed to be able to afford only a few dollars of gas at a time for his VW), but by college he had branched out and was shoplifting television sets, stereos, a Boston fern for his apartment (which he called “Fern” and took loving care of), another plant, a Ficus Benjamina ( highly poisonous), tools and a tool chest, more ski clothes and ski boots, textbooks, cookware, art, a Navajo rug, dozens of pairs of socks at a time, credit cards, and really good cuts of steak.
Louise always said Ted's favorite book as a child was Treasure Island. But by the time he was a teenager, his tastes had changed to detective magazines, true crime, as well as pornography. Ted was fascinated with true crime stories and detective magazines, popular reading in America in the days before cable television and reenactments of crimes. (Author Ann Rule, who became a friend of his as his crime spree was beginning, wrote for some of the magazines in the 1970s.)
He might have read the July 1961 issue of True Detective, with a cover illustration depicting a visit to a Lover's Lane lookout gone bad. A man is busily tying a young woman's hands behind her back. Her boyfriend looks to be dead, slumped over the driver's side of his red T-bird convertible, and who knows what horrors await the girl.
Or maybe Ted read the next month's issue of True Detective, the very month Ann Marie Burr disappeared. Once again, a young woman—this time wearing just a swimsuit—looks frightened as she finds her boyfriend dead, sprawled on the back of what appears to be a wooden ski boat, maybe a Chris Craft. On this cover, the killer is out of sight but obviously lurking nearby, waiting to jump out and surprise the girl when she is at her most vulnerable.
The boyfriends may be dead, but they had money and good taste when alive.
While the titles of the magazine articles seemed as benign as a Perry Mason episode (The Clue of the Discarded Nylons, and The Killer Liked Apple Pie appear in those issues), Ted liked the magazines because some of them were graphic inside, with real crime scene photos of dead and sexually assaulted bodies (later, he called the magazines “very potent material”). Some of the titles of the articles could have described Ted's crimes, years later: Bludgeoned Brunette in Butternut Creek, and Case of the Strangled Coed, were featured in True Detective in 1966.
Ted c
ould have followed the careers of Tacoma's two most-famous crime fighters, detectives Tony Zatkovich and Ted Strand, colorfully described in articles titled Rendezvous With A Corpse and Let Me Lead You To His Grave in magazines promising “authentic stories of crime detection.” In April 1966, Ted could have read in Master Detective about a crime close to home. The headline to the story was: An Appeal to Master Detective Readers CAN YOU HELP FIND ANNE [sic] MARIE BURR?
Ted would be a police junkie the rest of his life (extremely common for serial killers). Beginning with the magazines and books on crime he could find at the library, he studied police procedures and how people got away with murder. It may have seemed to his parents that it was just another hobby—if they even knew of his interest in police work and murder. All Louise remembered was finding a copy of Playboy under his bed once or twice during his teenage years. (Many years later, after Ted's death, the FBI noted how he sometimes used his victims to re-enact scenarios on the covers of detective magazines.)
It wasn’t until near the end of his life that Ted would describe the beginnings of what he called—with gross understatement—his “trouble” or his “problem.” Referring to his teenage interest in peeping, Ted told journalist Stephen Michaud, “Again, this is something that a lot of young boys would do and without intending any harm, and that was basically where I was at the time. But I see how it later formed the basis for the so-called entity, that part of me that began to visualize and fantasize more violent things... ” His fascination with sex and murder coincided with other changes in Ted. He didn’t understand social interactions. “I didn’t know what made things tick,” he told Michaud. “I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what made people attractive to one another. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.” He had trouble completing things and so had a spotty and erratic college career and job history. He marveled at the ease with which his four half-siblings fit in. In high school he felt out of touch with his peers, including boys he had grown up with. He described himself as “stuck,” and told Michaud, “In my early schooling, it seemed like there was no problem in learning what the appropriate social behaviors were. It just seemed like I hit a wall in high school.” His explanation of those years is contradictory and secretive. In other words, pure Ted Bundy.
Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy Page 5
