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

by Rebecca Morris

  In the Pacific Northwest and across western Canada there were reports of small girls crying that they wanted to go home to their mommy and daddy. In British Columbia; at Harts Lake at the foot of Mt. Rainier; at a roadside motel hundreds of miles to the east on the other side of Washington state; and soon at the Seattle World's Fair, young blonde girls would plead with strangers to take them home.

  Don had offered to take a second polygraph test. Detectives Strand and Zatkovich didn’t think Don was hiding anything, but they continued to question him intensely. Don told police he thought his neighbor Mr. E__, Susie's father, should take a test, too. In trying to reconstruct the evening Ann had vanished, Don remembered hearing what he thought was the E's__ garage at a late hour. And Don had another suggestion: that Father Godley, the priest at St. Patrick's, take a polygraph.

  Detective Strand and Lt. Richardson paid the priest a visit. They talked with him about his impressions of the Burr family and then asked, would the priest “subject himself” to a polygraph? It wasn’t a surprise to the priest. He had known for weeks that Don wanted him to take the test, and Father Godley admitted to the police that he had been “boiling mad” ever since. The priest told them that “a man in his position is not likely to be questioned as a suspect as he is a man of God and is trying to save lives rather than destroy them.” He told them that he had worked hard to “bring the Burr family together in the Catholic life” by baptizing the children. And he had tolerated—and tried to help—the family during the dust-up over Don's taking Catholic instruction. Then, in a huff, the priest explained to the police that he had done so much for them, and yet he hadn’t seen them in church since the baptisms. He had endured the questions about Robert Bruzas and the police stakeout of the church in hopes of finding a predator thought to be hanging around. But asking him to take a polygraph was too much. He said it was against the laws of the church, and furthermore the Bishop would never allow it. And then he added this concern: if word ever got out to the congregation that a priest had submitted to a lie detector test, his reputation would be ruined on account of the gossip. He concluded his interview with the police by saying that “in his own mind he knew that he was innocent and any thought to the contrary was ridiculous.” Police ran a credit check on Don and Bev. “The Burr's have an excellent credit rating,” they wrote in their report, adding that as a logger in California, Don was “classified as a satisfactory person... in State of Oregon, was highly regarded.” They talked to the Burr's dentist and doctors; all said that the parents were affectionate with their children.

  Every December 14, Bev threw a birthday party for Ann. Before she was school age, the guests were her young cousins and neighborhood friends. Bev chronicled each party in Ann's green album with “Baby's First Seven Years” embossed on the front. As if she had had a premonition that there would be no others, Bev had made the most of the album, squeezing eight years out of it. The prior year, for what would be Ann's last birthday party on December 14, 1960, 12 girls came home with Ann after school. They played games, including Bingo. Bev and Don gave their daughter “Tammy,” her big doll, and clothes for her, including the matching nightgown Bev had sewn. Ann also received a book about Bluebirds, which she had just joined, a jewelry case, and several coloring sets. Each girl attending the party received a Christmas “prize.” Bev made a dessert she called “Apple Santa,” baked with the fruit from Mrs. Gustafson's small orchard next door.

  A year later, on December, 14, 1961, on what would have been Ann's ninth birthday, there was no party. There were no children celebrating. There were no games. Bev wept in private.

  She grieved the death of Ann's canary, the aging of her dog Barney, the change of seasons, and the day-by-day adjustments of life without Ann.

  Bev tried to rally as Christmas approached. She had to give her other children some kind of Christmas. She shopped for gifts, sewed, baked, and held her breath that Ann might be home for Christmas. On Christmas Eve morning, the telephone rang. The tape recorder in the basement recorded the call. The caller said a man who worked at the Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma (a boarding school founded to give the daughters of pioneers a Christian education) had taken Ann, or knew where she was. The caller was arrested three days later; he was a disgruntled janitor trying to get even with the boss who had recently fired him.

  The credible ransom demands, the clues, the evidence, the leads that the police and the family thought were sure to develop and lead them to Ann, never materialized. There were a few foolish men, cranks trying to cash in on the search for the girl. They all asked for a few hundred dollars, not the full reward. Police never solved the mystery of the man dressed as a woman who Julie said talked to her and asked where she lived, just hours before Ann disappeared. They never found the midget with a beard one neighbor had reported seeing. They did find Carl B__ who was trying to interest homeowners in building a bomb shelter. He had boasted to others at the construction company where he worked that he had seen the missing girl. He told police that he had been in the Burr's neighborhood and saw a girl dressed only in a flimsy, pink dress, carrying a doll as she walked north in the wind and rain.

  Police concluded he was “a strange person... somewhat of a loner... more of a hanger on than an employee” of the construction company. He told police his wife had shot at him once as he entered his home via a window. He, in turn, had applied for a concealed weapons permit and had been turned down. They gave Mr. B__ a polygraph exam. The results were negative.

  Police thought their one real lead might be the print of the tennis shoe. Detectives took the mold of the shoe print they found in the yard to Soines Shoe Store, at North 26th and Proctor, apparently the only store in Tacoma that sold the “gym type shoe” with the unusual tread. Soines said the shoe was about the size of a teenager's foot, or a small man. The police were given the names of five families, and questioned a nine-year-old boy who owned a pair of the shoes. An 18-year-old had also purchased the shoes, but the police never questioned him because he had left for college in California. There is no record what they learned from the others who had purchased the shoes.

  Donald F. Burr, the architect, continued to believe that his daughter Debra Sue had been the intended target. If it wasn’t a scheme of her birthmother's, then maybe it was by someone who knew that the architect designed many homes and schools and was making a good living.

  On January 23, 1962, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's headline read: “145 Days of Heartbreak: They’ll Hunt a ‘Lifetime’ for Ann Marie.” Pictured are Bev and Don, seated in their living room with Ted Strand beside Bev and Tony Zatkovich leaning over Don and pointing to a calendar in Bev's lap. As if any of them needed to be reminded how much time had passed.

  One hundred and forty-five days of swimming through sewers, crawling under houses, mailing twenty thousand posters with Ann's photograph to law enforcement agencies. One hundred and forty-five sleepless nights for Bev and Don, nights spent talking with Julie after the other children had gone to bed. Julie, at seven, was the most distressed of the children and felt the loss of her older sister—her best friend—keenly. She was in second grade at Grant elementary School, where Ann should have been right down the hall in a third-grade classroom.

  Julie was aware that everyone was talking about Ann's disappearance; Julie felt pitied, and she did not want to be pitied. A classmate of Julie's remembers how quiet the girl was that year, and that the school didn’t say much, not officially anyway, to the students. “The school probably assumed there would be a ransom, and Ann would be back in a few days,” the woman said. “I was scared, and didn’t know what to say to Julie. So none of us talked at school about Ann. But my parents talked a lot about it at home.” Bev had taken the children with her while she put up the posters, and according to Julie, the children went along to help search the parks, gullies, and ravines for Ann. Presumably, they might have stumbled over their sister's dead body. It was what everyone was looking for, wasn’t it? Bev denied that the children he
lped search, but Julie was adamant that they did, and that it added to their trauma. Of course, Bev didn’t drive, so where she went, the children almost always went. Bev and Don didn’t believe in babysitters except for Bev's mother, Marie.

  Julie was terrified to turn eight years old, but she did on February 28, 1962. She was now the age her sister was when she disappeared. Bev told a newspaper that Julie didn’t like being the oldest.

  It wouldn’t look right for a mother of a missing girl to be pessimistic, so in interview after interview, Bev spoke of having hope. Sometimes she even believed she did. And in articles, Don sounded hopeful. If their relationship with their parish priest was strained, Bev and Don didn’t let on. An article mentioned Don quoting Father Godley as having told the family: “She is already with God, if that's the way it is to be.”

  But Bev was floundering, trying to decide if her Catholic faith was a solace or disappointment. If prior to Ann's disappearance Father Godley didn’t see the Burr family in church very often, that would change. Julie's memory of the months after Ann disappeared are of Sundays and how her mother would sit in church, sobbing. “When she was first taken, I thought it was God's will,” Bev said. “Later I said, ‘That was a stupid thing to say.’” Bev wrestled with what she believed, but regardless, she concluded every prayer with these words to herself: “And bless our Ann.”

  7

  The Birth of the Hunchback

  HIS EYES WOULD TURN BLACK. Or he would suddenly develop a mark on his cheek. Other times he would emit an odor, one more animal than human. From the time Ted was a three-year-old scaring his aunt with knives, to later when teachers, friends, and relatives began to witness his sudden anger, there was a physical metamorphosis that came over him.

  Ted's childhood and high school friends witnessed changes in him when he got mad; his normally blue eyes darkened. Ted was quick to rage as a child. If he got angry, he could shove a plate of food in your face. If a fern caught him near an eye during a pretend game of warfare, he would start a fistfight, even with his best friend. He liked to jump out from behind bushes and scare his friends. It wasn’t just in the spirit of fun; he experienced a kind of twisted glee if he startled them. On death row, he admitted that as a child, he threw tantrums and urinated in a store to get the attention of his mother. His longtime college girlfriend wrote of a peaceful river rafting trip interrupted when he suddenly lunged at her and shoved her into the water. He couldn’t understand why she was upset. He grew up, but in many ways he never matured.

  His great-aunt, Virginia Bristol, told of a pleasant evening at a concert in Pennsylvania with Ted, then college-aged. They were standing on a platform waiting for a train when she said Ted suddenly started to verbally ramble; she said that he made no sense and looked crazy and that she was “afraid to be alone with him.” Joe Aloi, an investigator for the Florida public defender's office, said that one day when he and Ted were talking, Ted suddenly “became weird.” Aloi described how Ted's body and face changed, how there was almost a complete change of personality and how Ted exhibited extreme tension. And Aloi was aware of an odor. He said that was the day he became afraid of Ted.

  Journalist Stephen Michaud began to call Ted Bundy “the hunchback” when the Florida prosecutor, while trying Ted for the murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, described what people think a criminal is: “a hunchbacked, cross-eyed little monster slithering through the dark, leaving a trail of slime.” Michaud, who spent hundreds of hours audio taping interviews with Ted, said he hid behind “a mask of sanity.” Like Aloi, and Ted's great-aunt, Michaud witnessed moments of metamorphosis. “When we’d be talking about the murders, he would grab the (tape) recorder and cradle it. There was a white mark on his left cheek, like a scratch. After a while it would fade away.” Ted's longtime college girlfriend noticed moments when his eyes looked close together.

  During the last 15 years of his life, an army of detectives, psychiatrists, attorneys, journalists and family members of dead girls would struggle to understand the darkness that descended on Ted beginning in his teenage years. In addition to Michaud's “the hunchback,” Ted's “problem” would be called “the malignant being” and an “altered state.” He would be diagnosed or described as having a life-long personality disorder, bipolar disease (manic depression), dysphasia, abnormal brain chemistry, maladaptive personality structure, affective disorder , and DID (dissociative identity disorder). Ted simply called his talent for hurting others without remorse his “flaw.” He learned to compartmentalize, to have “boxes in his head,” according to one investigator. He could think of himself as the “good Ted” and the “bad Ted.” It was “the other Ted,” “the entity,” who was responsible for those horrible murders. And yet he would never let his attorneys use “the other Ted” as a defense for his crimes.

  Experts debated—are still debating—exactly what the early and adolescent influences on Ted were. As a teenager, Ted almost certainly began to show evidence of the manic depression that plagued both his grandparents. It took different forms in them: his grandfather was violent and controlling, his grandmother prone to depression and agoraphobia (and who knows what traits his birth father might have passed on to Ted). One psychiatrist believed that because Ted always bludgeoned his victims, he had most likely been beaten with a stick—by a woman—when he was a child.

  As he entered his teenage years, a pattern began to emerge; when he was in the grips of the downside of his depression he lied, he stole, he manipulated others, he felt no empathy and no responsibility for his own actions and—eventually—he killed. Alcohol or marijuana helped him to act on his impulses and act out his fantasies. When he was on a manic upswing, he would move, change colleges, and change majors. Then his moods would drop again, and he couldn’t go to classes, would sabotage himself and his relationships, drop out of school, drink, smoke pot, prowl, steal, and kill. He called them his “frenzy episodes,” even while continuing to proclaim his innocence.

  Dr. Dorothy Lewis, the psychiatrist who worked on Ted's behalf near the end of his life, testified that Ted had “no insight into these wide fluctuations” before she documented his ups and downs. She could chart his mood swings to when he had committed crimes. There would be an upswing of mania that would lead to killings; the depression came after—not over his hurting someone, but over the physical release killing provided him. She says that during his “frenzy episodes” his compulsions would build, and what little impulse control he had lessened. Only killing would quiet his rage.

  She saw a metamorphosis, too, which she explained as a kind of a dissociative state similar to a fugue state or a hysterical state. “...These are times when sometimes individuals go off and don’t even know who they are for a period of time, and wind up somewhere else in the country,” she testified to a Florida court. “And they don’t know how they got there... my guess is there is abnormal brain activity, but we don’t, we just don’t know what causes them. Certainly there is something episodically going on that is aberrant and abnormal.”

  An associate of Dr. Lewis’ involved in testing Ted concluded that he had experienced “severe early deprivation.” And early deprivation is as serious as any other kind of child abuse.

  But his parents and half-siblings saw nothing, or said they saw nothing. To his mother, Louise, he would always be the thoughtful young man who never forgot to send flowers on Mother's Day. His half-sister, Linda Bussey, six years younger than Ted and the oldest of Louise and Johnnie's four children, recalls only “a great childhood, super great parents.” The man who finally admitted to killing dozens of young women—and hinted of many more—was, according to Bussey, “not the person I knew.”

  Bussey still lives in Tacoma, near where Louise and Ted first settled and just blocks from the UPS campus and the Burr home. Repeating “it was a great childhood,” is all she will say about Ted's early years. She says she never talked with Ted about who his birth father was, and claims she has never given any thought to what made Ted arguably t
he most famous serial killer in America. Her explanation of their childhood and home life is much like Ted and Louise denying there was anything amiss at his grandparent's house.

  Without question, the most complicated relationship of Ted's life was with his mother. For most of his life, Ted Bundy would tell himself—and others—conflicting stories about his parentage. When he confided his illegitimacy to Ann Rule (a friend and co-worker at a crisis hotline in Seattle who was writing a book about the search for a young killer with only a first name, “Ted”), he said he was raised believing that Louise was his sister and that he was a “late baby” born to Samuel and Eleanor Cowell. A college girlfriend, who under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall wrote about her six-year long relationship with Ted, stated that he cried when he told her about finding out he was illegitimate.

  “Ted told a little different story to everybody. He lied all the time,” said Rule. “It was very hard to tell when Ted was being genuine,” according to Stephen Michaud, who believes it is “entirely possible” that his grandfather, Samuel Cowell, was Ted's father.

  Some heard a story about Ted's cousin taunting him about being illegitimate; some saw him angry and resentful of his mother for the embarrassment of his birth. To others he told a story about how he had “found” his birth certificate, saying “father unknown.” Still other close teenage friends say Ted never mentioned his illegitimacy.

  “My impression is that Ted felt humiliated by circumstances of his birth. He felt alone in that shame,” said his last attorney, Polly Nelson. And Nelson, as well as boyhood friends of Ted's, said he had only a slight relationship with his step-father. “I had the impression that Johnnie didn’t exist at all; he ignored him,” Nelson said. The circumstances of his birth set the stage for Ted's complicated relationship with Louise. “If she was humiliated when he was born, imagine her humiliation when he was arrested,” said Nelson.