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

by Rebecca Morris

  By Sunday, police had administered polygraphs to nearly 30 men and boys. One was 13-year-old Terry M__, who lived about a block from the Burrs. A year before, Terry had been arrested for window peeping at the college and taken to Remann Hall, the juvenile detention center and school. What the police found especially intriguing as they took another look at him was that he liked to peep early, before 6 a.m. His family attended St. Patrick's, he knew Ann, and his younger brother played with her. Terry had been to the Burrs’ many times, but claimed to never have been inside the home.

  Terry's father was furious with the police. Just because his son had been picked up for peeping when he was 12, the police were trying to hang Ann Burr's disappearance on him. Besides, the father said, window peeping is normal; a lot of boys do it.

  But the police were intrigued with all the questions the boy asked about the case. Terry asked them as many questions as they asked of him. Did they have any evidence? He mused over his own theories with the police: it must have been a prowler. Were the searchers wearing gloves? Not to preserve evidence, but in case they had to comb through raspberry and blueberry bushes which were so fierce in the Northwest they could rip your skin off? The police concluded Terry was just as good a suspect as anyone else.

  Detectives were going to the shoe stores in town, trying to track down a boy's or men's tennis shoe that matched the print on the Burr's bench. They might have been Keds, but they had an unusual tread; that was their best clue so far. They withheld the information from the newspapers; a teenager, or even his parents, might hastily dispose of tennis shoes with an unusual sole.

  The police finally got 15-year-old Robert Bruzas down to the police station. “It had been brought to our attention previously that Robert associated more with the younger children than those around his own age group,” Detectives Strand and Zatkovich wrote. Robert had been a Tribune paper boy for the last 13 months, a substitute carrier before that, and he was also working at the college swimming pool two blocks west. They asked him about his friends (one was Terry M__ ) their ages, and if he had ever kissed the 17-year-old girl that he admitted liking. He said no. Robert admitted playing with Ann and the other young girls in the neighborhood, “probably because none of the boys around his age were in that immediate vicinity. Another reason was that he liked the children.” He told the detectives that on the afternoon before Ann disappeared, he saw her and her friend Susie as he was on his way to pick up his newspapers. Then, police gave him a polygraph. He did not pass.

  Two days later, on the first day of his sophomore year at Stadium High School (where Bev Burr had edited the yearbook and set her sights on being a professional writer), the detectives pulled Robert out of an afternoon class, and took him to the police department for a second round of tough questioning. Detectives Strand and Zatkovich—who liked to “kick a juvenile in the ass and send him home”—did a job on Robert. With no parents or lawyers present, “They told me I was lying,” Robert Bruzas said years later. “I was pretty naïve, and I was scared.” They hammered him with questions and reminded him he had failed a polygraph two days before. Then they drove him home, and told his mother, Alice, that they wanted Robert to speak with Father Godley at St. Patrick's, where the Bruzas and Burr families worshipped. His mother agreed he would. Neighbors offered the family the name of an attorney.

  The next day, the detectives paid a visit to the priest. Father Godley hadn’t met with Robert yet, but another priest had. Father Godley told them he didn’t know if he would still meet with Robert. After all, he reminded them, what would be the point? Anything the teenager would tell him, any confession, would be kept in confidence.

  The detectives were finding Father Godley elusive. Whether because of the confidentiality of the priest-congregant relationship, or wanting to distance the parish from the tragedy, he was not being particularly helpful to the police. The police had wanted to search the church the day Ann went missing, and they did. But when they inquired about a child molester thought to hang around the church, they didn’t get much help. They staked out the church, sending a plainclothes cop to mass, but he didn’t spot the man they were looking for. When the priest called on the grieving family, Bev did what she often did: she documented the occasion with a photograph, and served him apple pie.

  In the photo, the priest is sitting comfortably in an oversized chair, smiling broadly; on either side of him are Julie and Mary, also smiling. Hanging on the wall in back of them is a print of the iconic painting of Jesus, “The Head of Christ,” by Warner Sallman. An angry showdown between Father Godley and Don was yet to come.

  In their report, Strand and Zatkovich wrote that although Robert passed a second polygraph and “denied having any immoral ideas in reference to the children,” they still considered him “a likely suspect.”

  Robert's father and older brother were also questioned and took polygraphs. The police were especially thorough searching the Bruzas house. Still, sometime over the weekend, when the Bruzas family was scattered and no one was home, Bev Burr went to the back door. Unlike the Burrs, who always locked up, the Bruzas’ didn’t lock their doors, so Bev went right on in.

  She had to see for herself. She searched the main floor and the upstairs, where the children slept. She didn’t risk taking the time to search the basement or the attic. There was no sign of Ann, no St. Christopher bracelet that might have been worn by a small girl, no red sweater with a snag in one of the children's rooms.

  Both Don and Bev would be asked to confront their pasts in the days after Ann vanished. For Don, his relationship with his father over the sale of the logging company and with his mother over his taking Catholic instruction were barely healed wounds. For Bev, it was facing what life might have been if she hadn’t married Don. She gave the police the name of a man who had loved her and offered to give up everything for her: Larry M__ .

  Bev was well-read and knew what was going on in the world. Two years earlier she had read about the Clutters, the Kansas family murdered by two petty thieves who thought the wealthy farmer kept money in his house (the case was immortalized by Truman Capote in his book, In Cold Blood). Bev thought of the Clutters when Ann was taken.

  “We could have all been shot. Who were they after?” she asked, referring to the person or persons who broke into her home. “Were they after a certain one of us or not? Who were they after?” She had also read of Candy Rogers, the nine-year-old Spokane girl who had disappeared March 6, 1959, while selling Camp Fire Girl mints. Ann was a Camp Fire Girl too and sold mints. During the search for Candy Rogers, three Air Force servicemen died when their helicopter struck an electric line and plunged into the Spokane River. Sixteen days after the girl disappeared, she was found raped and murdered. Her murder was never solved. Her father could not live with the tragedy, and killed himself four years later.

  Bev and Don Burr, as well as the police, were frustrated by the few ransom calls they received.

  Bev:

  Hello. Hello?

  Call:

  Hello. Who is this speaking, please?

  Bev:

  This is Mrs. Burr speaking.

  Call:

  Ah.

  Bev:

  Hello

  Call:

  Hello

  Bev:

  Yes.

  Call:

  Is your daughter missin’?

  Bev:

  Yes, she is gone.

  Call:

  If you’d like to have your daughter back I want $5,000 in cash by tomorrow night.

  Bev:

  Well, I don’t... can you tell us how and what to do, please? Can you tell us what to do, please?

  Call:

  Drive by the park in Tacoma.

  Bev:

  What park is it? Which park do you mean? Hello?

  Call:

  Hello.

  Bev:

  Did you say to do what?

  Call:

  The park off of J Street.

  Bev:

&nbs
p; The park off of J Street. There isn’t any park... you mean Wright's Park or which park?

  Call:

  Wright's Park.

  Bev:

  Wright's Park, that one near downtown?

  Call:

  Right, drive south by 3 o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Five thousand dollars in cash, that's all.

  Bev:

  Well, I don’t understand what you mean.

  Call:

  That's all.

  Bev:

  Well, where do you mean? Hello? Hello? Hello?

  Wright Park—its real name—is in North Tacoma, just a few blocks from the apartment where Ann's maternal grandmother, Marie Leach, lived. Since the late 1800s, the citizens of Tacoma could take the streetcar to the “English Style” park. In its glory days, there was lawn bowling, Fourth of July celebrations, Easter egg hunts, and “peaceful ponds” where swans glided in the summer, and college students skated in winter. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the park went the way of other urban parks, and picked up a new name—Wright Park became known as “Fright Park.”

  Detectives Zatkovich and Strand went to Bev and Don's house the morning after the ransom call. The detectives must have had their doubts about its validity, because they asked Bev and Don if they wanted the police to stake out the park, and by the way, would they want to go along? Bev and Don declined. A plainclothes officer spent hours at the park but never found the caller.

  The police did involve Don in the next ransom demand. Don had received a call from a man who said he was an ex-con so couldn’t give his name, and that he had been in a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. He claimed he had information about Ann—she was alive, but not in the state. He needed “one or two hundred dollars for expenses” to go retrieve her. The man asked Don to meet him at the Greyhound bus depot and to wear a light colored top coat and carry a hat under his right arm. Don got out his light gray coat and put his brown hat under his arm and met the man at the bus depot. So did Detectives Strand and Zatkovich. They arrested Neal L__, whose only address was the Veterans Hospital on Seattle's Beacon Hill. He denied contacting Don, but they found the Burr's phone number on two items in his pocket.

  Five days after Ann disappeared, Bev fastened the Superman cape onto Greg's shoulders. She was relieved that he could still be excited about his first day of kindergarten. This is what she wanted, she reminded herself, to help her children still experience the childhood they deserved. She and Mary walked Greg and Julie (now in second grade) to Grant School in the morning, and in the afternoon they were outside, ready to see them home. She would not let them walk alone, as she had let Ann.

  That morning, Bev noticed activity she tried to distract the children from seeing. The Labor Day weekend had delayed garbage pickup, and now the trucks were rumbling through the neighborhood. Police had only done a cursory look at containers within a radius of several blocks of the Burr residence. Now the crews on the garbage trucks citywide had been asked to look closely for a small body or a blue and white flowered nightgown. They found a child's nightgown, and police took it to show Bev, but it wasn’t Ann's.

  Bev missed Ann terribly; she should have been walking with them, the eldest, the leader, the star pupil, the pianist, the artist. Bev had reread many times the comments from Ann's teacher at the end of the previous school year. The girl's second-grade teacher, Esther Reilly, called Ann an excellent student, a good reader, capable and dependable, creative, well-liked by all the children, and a joy to have in the room. The report ended with the teacher predicting Ann would have a very happy year in third grade.

  6

  145 Days

  IN RECOGNITION OF THE MOST WIDESPREAD manhunt in Tacoma history, the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr was selected by the editors and reporters of the Tacoma News Tribune as the top news story of 1961—bigger than the resignation of Police Chief Roy Kerr (after a disagreement with the new city manager); bigger than the crash of a military jet immediately after takeoff from nearby McChord Air Force Base, killing 18 servicemen on board; bigger that the Tacoma Giants winning the Pacific Coast League pennant.

  But first came the fall, and Ann's birthday, and then Christmas.

  Bev's mother, Marie—who had finally realized that her granddaughter Ann wasn’t being willful and hiding, but was gone—put up one thousand dollars for a reward. Bev and Don added to it as did some community groups and the amount climbed to five thousand dollars. A photograph in the newspaper publicizing the reward showed Marie, Bev, and Ann's dog, Barney. The story said the family hoped the reward would “spur some new development in the mysterious Aug. 31 disappearance of the pretty, blonde girl,” and reiterated that, despite the bench that had been moved and the window and door found open, police still had no proof that anyone had entered the house. The story tried to put to rest gossip that Bev and Don were away for part of the evening and were to blame for their daughter's disappearance. But the rumors persisted. Some of Bev's friends went around town, asking for contributions to the reward money. One time, Bev was with a friend who approached the owner of a small hardware store. “Hell, I wouldn’t donate a dime!” he declared. “There's no mystery about that girl. The Burrs themselves know where she is.” Bev left the store without identifying herself.

  Soon, new versions of the missing posters—with the photograph of Ann, somber, wearing her lei—had an awkwardly drawn addition: a hand, with one finger pointing to lettering announcing:

  $5000 REWARD Is Now Being Offered By The Family & Friends for Information Leading To The Return Of Ann Marie Burr.

  Late at night after the children were asleep, Bev and Don worked at the dining room table, taping the hand with the pointing finger onto the posters (now reminiscent of Uncle Sam ordering young men to enlist in the Army).

  There was rarely a day without an update in the newspapers. In October, Bev and Don asked residents of Tacoma to search their property again and urged hunters to be on the lookout as deer season approached.

  On the day before Thanksgiving, Bev wrote an “open letter, in the spirit of Thanksgiving Day,” to her daughter's kidnapper. It was printed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer along with an update on the case. In a photograph accompanying the story, three-year-old Mary—too young to remember if she saw her sister taken three months before—is sucking the knuckles on her right hand as she sits on Bev's lap. There's a Bible open, as if Bev had been reading to Mary. In the letter Bev wrote:

  “If the one who took our little girl is reading this, will you think about what Jesus said about those who sinned against Him: ‘There will be joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, more than over ninety-nine just persons who have no need of repentance.’ Luke 15, 1-10. We pray that you will have the strength to come forward and confess; tell us, her mother and father, where she is.”

  Detective Ted Strand, a Camel dangling from one hand, had the other on the wheel of the 1958, white Chevy with Oregon plates. It was Dec. 8 and he was driving Mrs. Leone M. Teeters around Tacoma. He kept a tape recorder going to capture her thoughts about where Ann Burr might be.

  “I have a peculiar, nervous feeling, and I feel like I want to cry,” the psychic told Strand. The department had been contacted by dozens of psychics, and to be kind to Bev, the detectives listened to most of them. Bev would rule out no possible source of information. Bev herself had given a man a small cup Ann often drank out of, for him to use when he went searching with his divining rod. She turned down another man's request for a pair of Ann's socks, but only because she assumed he was going to use a tracking dog and a dog would need a scent. All of Ann's clothes were clean when she disappeared so there were no socks, nothing with a lingering scent of the girl.

  Mrs. Teeters, from Seattle, had had visions of a dark green Chevrolet being parked near the Burr's the night Ann vanished. She had also “seen” in her vision a two-story white house next to a brown house. Because the population of Tacoma was nearly 148,000 and the town was composed of mostly single-family residences, looking for
a two-story white house next to a brown house seemed like the hunt for the proverbial needle in a haystack. But Strand drove Mrs. Teeters for hours, first north from the Burr's, then eventually turning south at her direction, making a loop that took them by the Allenmoore Public Golf Course, where she said she felt “bothered.” Strand told her that a body of a 32-year-old man had been found there a few weeks before. Then she changed her mind, and they looked for a house standing alone with empty lots on both sides. Near the end of their outing Mrs. Teeters said she believed Ann was alive, would be found within three months, but was not in Tacoma. The police, she said, would have to go “far afield” to find the girl.

  The newspaper updates did elicit new tips. Mrs. Evelyn K___, of Oak Harbor, Washington, telephoned Tacoma police to say that on a trip from Alaska, through Canada, across Montana, and into Idaho in early September, she had spoken with a young girl with a hurt finger. Mrs. K__ and her husband had pulled over at a one-pump service station for a snack; it might have been a Texaco station, but it could have been a Standard Oil station. The girl was with a man and a woman and another child. “She came around the end of the counter to talk to us. She wanted to go with us in our camper... there was something wrong with a fingernail on the left hand.” Mrs. K__ went on to say that the couple didn’t like the girl talking to them, and were “...unnecessarily rough with her... (the woman) grasped for her and sort of shook her around... ”

  The police had her repeat details about the girl's hurt finger. It seemed to be the same finger that Bev Burr treated with mercurochrome on the night Ann disappeared. But the police were skeptical of finding the gas station. Mrs. K__ wasn’t sure if she was in Montana or Idaho at the time.