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

by Rebecca Morris

  There is great sympathy for the people fated to be the parents of Ted Bundy (except from those authors, psychiatrists or investigators who hoped to get Louise Bundy to give them insights into Ted, and found her unhelpful). Sandi Holt, who knew Louise and Johnnie Bundy from Cub Scout outings and as the parents of her brother's friend, said Louise was “very loving, caring and nurturing to Ted. I saw it in her participating in scouting.”

  But longtime family friends, and some relatives, call the Bundys a secretive family. Ted's cousin, Edna Martin, said “nobody knows” who Ted's father was—and that her parents never knew. “We did hear that rumor” that Ted was born of an incestuous encounter, Martin said. “I think Ted had a real need to find out who he was. He was relieved Johnnie wasn’t his father.” She calls the Bundys “a close family” and her cousin Ted “a close friend.” Like Doug Holt, her brother, John, considered Ted his best friend. Yet, Ted envied the Cowell's lifestyle, the music always present in the house, the foreign sports cars, and the trips to Europe.

  Those who got to know the family only after Ted's arrests have strong opinions, too. “I wouldn’t call her cold,” attorney Polly Nelson said of Louise. “I’d call her controlled. She wasn’t a bad person, or a drunk, she was a simple person. She was so overwhelmed that she didn’t have anything to give him. He didn’t admire her, he had contempt. He was really envious of his half-siblings, how comfortable and easy it was for them.”

  Stephen Michaud said Ted lied to his parents about his crimes for years and that they believed Ted was innocent— until Michaud arrived in Tacoma with a tape recorder to play them one of Ted's confessions. “His mother was simply another person to use,” Michaud said.

  8

  One Year Later

  BEV THREW HERSELF INTO THE BLACKBERRY BRAMBLES. Her family thought she was simply working to clear the land near her father's cabins on Fox Island. But she knew what she was doing was a form of atonement. Her arms bled, her hands bled, her legs bled, and she wanted them to. Bev was not one to cry, so maybe the pain, the isolation of the work, the scrapes, and the bleeding, would distract her and give her an outward way to mourn. As Tom Robbins would write, “Nothing, not mushrooms, not ferns, not moss, not melancholy, nothing grew more vigorously, more intractably in the Puget Sound rains than blackberries.”

  Well, maybe in Bev's case, melancholy might defeat the blackberries. It was one year since Ann had vanished, and the family was back at the place that held many happy family memories, and some imperfect ones, too, if Bev was honest with herself. Photographs taken every summer had nearly the same pose: Mary, Greg, Julie, and Ann, with Barney, the cocker spaniel, lined up, youngest to oldest, left to right. Now there was a vacant space where Ann should be. The blackberry bushes presented an opportunity to Bev. “I thought, this will get my anger and feelings out so I’ll do it ‘till it's done.” Tacoma police had spent 5,000 man hours looking for Ann. Eight hundred soldiers, volunteers, police officers and Boy Scouts had searched. Police had questioned 1,500 people in just the first 12 days of the investigation and given polygraphs to 200 of them. Detectives had lived in Bev's basement for a month, waiting for a credible ransom demand that never came. Julie was the most troubled by her sister's disappearance. The other children were too young to comprehend what had happened. For five-year-old Greg, it was a bit of a lark. He liked the novelty of the police around their house and announced that he wanted to be a detective when he grew up.

  Police departments in 200 cities in the west were urged to be on the lookout for Ann. Bev spent hours at the library, finding the names and addresses of newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. She composed a news release and sent a copy to at least one newspaper in every major city. She had inquiries back from only one or two. Bev carried a stack of the missing poster with Ann's photo wherever she went; police had mailed twenty thousand of them to other law enforcement agencies.

  The daily visits from Detectives Ted Strand and Tony Zatkovich had slowed, but the two paid a one-year anniversary visit to Bev and Don, extending their sympathies and letting the family know they were still on the case. The Tacoma and Seattle newspapers ran stories acknowledging the one-year mark and updating the investigation. The headline on one in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer read, “Police detectives fear the happy, plump-cheeked child was carried off by a mental or sexual deviate.” Another headline read: “Strange Mystery Strengthens Faith of Grieved Parents.” In an odd restaging, Bev was photographed tucking Mary, now four years old, into what had been Ann's bed. “Mary Cried the Night Sister Ann Vanished a Year Ago,” the caption states. Julie didn’t want to stay in the bedroom she had shared with Ann, so she changed rooms, and Mary moved into it. But the illustrations on the wall, the headboard, the lamps, and bedspread and ruffles remained Ann's.

  As painful as the newspaper stories were, Bev knew that reminders of Ann's disappearance could prompt leads in the case. Bev, who knew her dream of being a writer had died, still had the journalist's instinct to chronicle everything. She carefully collected the articles and began to paste them in Ann's baby book. Following pages detailing her daughter's first steps, birthdays, and other childhood milestones (“she is aware of strangers,” Bev wrote when Ann turned one), there were now clippings about her disappearance. An album created after 1961 was labeled simply “After Ann.” Dozens would follow.

  By the time Bev was tearing at the blackberry vines, Detectives Strand and Zatkovich had spent hundreds of nights sitting in their car, smoking, and dissecting the Burr case. Their respite was flying lessons and then the purchase of a small plane. They kept it at an airfield in Fife, a small town east of Tacoma. They would fly their families down the Washington and Oregon coastline. Their years in a patrol car, and then as detectives, had made them “closer than brothers.” “You couldn’t get any closer,” is how Strand's son Ted (the third generation in his family named Ted Strand) describes them.

  In 1961, they were in their late 40s and were Tacoma's reigning crime fighters. They had survived the vigilante years, when, convinced that some police and city leaders were taking graft, they led dozens of other policemen on surprise raids of gambling and liquor establishments. They were fired by the city official they had embarrassed. But the town, especially the PTA, the Council of Churches, and the local newspapers, were outraged about the treatment of the police officers and of how the town fathers tolerated vice, all because a certain amount of gambling and prostitution should be expected in a seaport town.

  After weeks of hearings packed with “overflow crowds,” and the accusation by one of the former vigilantes that the two detectives were themselves on the take, they were reinstated with back pay. Zatkovich and Strand were assigned to what they considered Siberia, a beat in an area of the city so remote that it clearly showed they were in still in disfavor with their supervisors. But they remained popular with the newspaper reporters, who looked for any occasion to write about the two, even their arrest of a trick-or-treater who had vandalized a neighborhood on Halloween. By 1951, Zatkovich had lost his badge three times. Still, he was named Police Chief that year; within three months he had mouthed off to the city council and was sent back to the streets in a patrol car. He never stopped being outspoken, including about women police officers. He said they made him “sick,” and in a newspaper interview called them “women bulls.”

  Strand stood by Zatkovich when his partner accidentally shot and killed a teenage girl as he chased a suspected felon. Because of lingering hard feelings with city government, Zatkovich was charged with second-degree murder. A jury acquitted him, and he was restored to duty, again. The duo seemed to have nine lives.

  Strand's four children were older than Zatkovich's two sons, and by 1961, Strand was a grandfather four times over; Zatkovich's sons were at Wilson High School (where they knew a boy named Ted Bundy). The Strands and the Zatkovichs camped together and went on flying trips, but Ted and Tony's friendship was the catalyst for the families socializing. Ted and Tony were each other's yin and yang.
Strand was the cool headed one; Zatkovich wasn’t.

  At their respective homes, the detectives didn’t talk about the Burr case; together, it was almost all they could think about. They had never not solved a major case. In addition to speaking with the Burrs regularly, the detectives had stayed in touch with the other Donald Burr, the architect, the one who also had a young daughter. He remained convinced that his daughter had been the intended target. After tracing the movements of Burr's first wife, the mother of young Debra Sue Burr, Strand and Zatkovich had not been able to place Poldi or her husband Emile in the Tacoma area in 1961. There were lots of sightings of their make and model of car—a T-bird convertible with Illinois plates—but the detectives were almost certain that Poldi was in her native Austria in early August, the month Ann disappeared. What they couldn’t determine is where she went when she left Vienna on August 19.

  Nineteen hundred sixty-two wasn’t a summer Bev looked forward to, but neither was any summer. “I never liked summer. Something always goes wrong,” she remembered. It was summer, 1942, when Bev's closest friend, along with thousands of other Japanese, was expelled from Tacoma.

  Haruye Kawano was one of six Japanese children in Bev's sixth grade class at Central Elementary School; after Central, the girls went on to Jason Lee Junior High School. They had a lot in common; both their fathers owned small grocery stores, they lived just a few blocks from each other, and both girls were ambitious and competitive. “She was always elected president, I was elected vice president. It got to be irritating,” Bev joked.

  In April, 1942, when the girls were 14 years old, eight thousand Japanese, including Haruye, her parents and her four siblings were sent to a “Jap camp” built in the valley, near Puyallup. It was named Camp Harmony. The Tacoma News Tribune reported that Old Glory “flew proudly” over the camp, and that by summer the “Japs” had made a “cheerful exit,” and boarded the train for internment camps at Pinedale, California and Twin Falls, Idaho. The evacuation was “accomplished on time and without incident.” The newspaper boasted that only five “Jap” were left in the city—three were in jail and two were in hospitals. The city would be rid of them as soon as possible.

  After several weeks at Camp Harmony, Haruye and her family were sent away. Bev went to the train station to say goodbye to her young friend. She felt helpless as she stood and waved as the train pulled out of Tacoma, and Haruye and her family left a city that didn’t want them. Despite the description in the Tacoma News Tribune, it was not a cheerful exit.

  A year later it was put before the people of Tacoma: did they want the Japanese to return? A majority said no, and it was early 1945 before they were allowed to resettle in Tacoma. But not all of them came back. Bev learned that her friend eventually became a nurse and lived in Chicago, but they never saw each other again. Bev was not good at making close friends. She would never again try in the same way.

  It was summer, 1951, when Bev married Don. They had met as students at the University of Washington. During the war Don served in the Army Air Corps, where he learned accounting and bookkeeping. During one of their many breakups, Don dropped out of college and went to Alaska where he worked as an accountant and played the clarinet and saxophone in a dance band. And then he returned to Seattle and showed up at Bev's door. By then she had graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma and was living in one of her father's cabins on the east side of Fox Island, not far from Honeymoon Bay. She taught at the small school on the island, at what was known as Sylvan, Washington.

  Bev's father was not an outdoorsman, but he suspected that the land would be worth something, someday, as the surrounding cities grew. His efforts at owning land and cabins—especially ones that required a boat to get to— were mixed. On one of the family's first outings, the boat began to take on water and nearly sank before the family reached shore. He was relieved when a bridge connecting the island to the mainland was built in 1954.

  Bev liked teaching, but found it hard. It was her first experience, and she had four grades in one room at the island school. But her friend Larry M__ was teaching at the same school. It was not a coincidence. Although he was married, M__ was in love with Bev and she knew it. After Don's return from Alaska, Bev agreed to marry Don. But the day before the wedding, Larry made a last appeal to Bev: he would leave his wife and young daughter for her. He begged her not to marry Don. Bev went to her parents, saying she wanted to call off the wedding. “They said I would ruin their lives,” Bev remembered. “I should have done what I wanted to do.” She was headstrong, but not enough to defy her parents. She often wondered over the years: would she be any happier as the wife of an insurance salesman, which is what Larry became when he left teaching? Would Larry M__ have encouraged her, in ways that Don didn’t, to write, to drive, to be fun-loving?

  Bev's thoughts on what constituted a successful life were not popular with her parents. “I did not want to get married and raise a bunch of kids but that was not normal; what was normal was to marry and have kids,” she would say. But she had “big dreams.” She wanted to be a journalist or, as she stated candidly, a “famous writer.” When she spoke of her dream, she pantomimed being in the trenches and holding a rifle. She wanted to go where the action was.

  Bev and Don were married in her parent's living room on August 6, 1951. Bev knew quickly that it was a mistake, that she and Don were not compatible. “I was really in love with someone else,” Bev told Raleigh Burr's second wife, Bonnie Taschler. Ann was born 16 months later.

  After Ann disappeared, the police spoke with Larry M__. Bev had included his name on a list of family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances to be checked out. M__ willingly met with the police at their headquarters and told them he had not had contact with Bev in years. That may, or may not, have been the truth.

  Now it was summer again, one year since Ann had vanished. As Bev hacked at the blackberries, she thought of Ann, of what lay ahead. Ann's dog Barney would have to be put to sleep; he was having seizures. In a few days the children would start at a new school. They wouldn’t return to Grant, which Ann had attended. Bev hoped they would be safer at the parish school at St. Patrick's. And Bev planned to put away some of the family photos long-displayed at the brick bungalow on N. 14th Street. The ones with Ann were too heart-wrenching to see every day.

  And then there was a subject she planned to bring up to Don. Sometime after Mary was born Don had had a vasectomy (there were rumors that the Catholic Church would soon ease its stand on birth control, but Bev had never been particularly devout, and Don never formally joined the church). So if they were to contemplate filling the void that Ann had left, they would need to adopt. Bev began to think about the possibility. Another blonde-haired baby girl, another chance.

  Bev was certain that Ann was dead and that the person responsible was someone the family knew. Don was more optimistic. “He was very quiet; he went to his job every day. He had a lot to do, which is probably good,” Bev said. “He didn’t quite accept it. I knew different.”

  9

  The Cary Grant of Serial Killers

  HE PRACTICED POSING. HE COULD APPEAR SCHOLARLY. He could appear confident. He could appear charming, the all-American boy-next-door. Except the boyishness was really immaturity, and in a few years when he most wanted to impress young women, his posing didn’t work. He could only get them if he killed them.

  In high school Ted felt that he didn’t understand social situations and social cues; within a couple of years he found that he didn’t have to understand them—he could pretend. So he did. He gave off a glibness, a charm that was superficial but that many young women, and the state's politicians, thought was brilliance, even genius. There was talk, after he got involved in Republican state politics, that he might be another John Kennedy (a young Republican John Kennedy). Political leaders who he drove for, or spied for, or whose parties he attended, treated him like a favorite nephew.

  “I became expert at projecting something very different,” Ted
said later. “That I was busy. It is clear now, I think, that a huge part of my life was hidden from everyone—secret, as it were. It didn’t take much effort at all.”

  Ted was good at over-claiming—exaggerating or fabricating his knowledge, experience and background to impress others. He pretended to be a law student when he was a just a junior at the University of Washington. He took a summer class in Chinese language at Stanford University in order to impress a former girlfriend, but became “extremely depressed” and didn’t complete it. He considered a career in architecture, again to impress a girlfriend, but his grades weren’t good enough to get into the classes at the University of Washington. He eventually settled on studying psychology.

  He couldn’t sustain the suave charm that earned him, briefly, the moniker “The Cary Grant of serial killers.” In truth, the thing he was best at was undermining himself. He would stay in jobs just a few weeks or months (until he was suspected of stealing, or simply stopped showing up). He dropped in and out of colleges. Most importantly, he sabotaged his various trials by swaggering before juries that were deciding his life or death, and by either trying to represent himself or refusing to cooperate with defense attorneys. He would not plea bargain, even if it would have saved his life.

  After graduating from Wilson High School in Tacoma in 1965 (with average grades), Ted lived at home and attended the University of Puget Sound, the campus that he and his mother had lived near when they first arrived in Tacoma, and the campus that was searched for any trace of young Ann Marie Burr. In 1966, after less than a year at UPS and a gap of several months, he transferred to the University of Washington's Asian studies program, first living in a dorm, and then moving to an apartment. Ted later told a psychiatrist that his first years of college focused on his “longing for a beautiful coed.”