The FBI called him “organized.” He planned. He preselected the sites where he would dispose of the bodies; he did “discreet research” on his victims; he had his tools conveniently handy; and he planned every moment, from assault, to evidence disposal, to his alibi. It is probably why he left no evidence behind, except for a bite mark on one of his last victims. A few murders were random. If he felt an “urge” to kill, he would pick up a hitchhiker. Some have never been identified because Ted never knew their names and couldn’t pinpoint the disposal sites.
Ted returned to nearly all of his crime scenes, sometimes to move or better hide bodies or clothing, sometimes to remove the heads of his victims with a hacksaw. (In fact, he pointed out to the police that they might have caught him if they had staked out sites after finding a body, since he always returned.) Many of his assaults were outdoors, but in Utah he took his victims back to his apartment, where, according to the FBI, he reenacted scenarios depicted on the covers of detective magazines. Like other serial killers, he “improved” as he progressed. According to the FBI, he became “more sophisticated” until the end, when the stress of being a fugitive (after escaping from jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado) made him impulsive and disorganized. When that occurred, he changed from the “Cary Grant of serial killers,” to, as he described himself to Florida police, “...the most cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch you’ll ever meet.”
10
Life Without Ann
“ADOPTED GIRL HELPS TO FILL ACHING VOID,” said the headline in the Tacoma News Tribune. In the summer of 1963, two years after Ann disappeared, the Burrs adopted a baby girl. Bev probably contacted the newspapers herself. It seemed like a happy ending, or as close to one as the Burrs would have. But Bev also had another reason for publicizing the adoption.
In newspaper photographs, Bev and the children (Julie, now nine; Greg, seven; and Mary, now five), show off the new baby. She was blonde and brown-eyed, and the article said that the baby's... “cries, laughter, and hiccups are a welcome addition to the household.”
As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on July 18, 1963.
“No one can ever take the place of Ann Marie in our hearts,” said Mrs. Donald Burr yesterday, as she presented publicly for the first time the new baby girl she and her husband recently adopted. The new baby, Laura Gayle, about seven months, woke up smiling. She seemed pure sunshine in the house at 3009 N. 14th St., Tacoma, where for nearly two years now there have been heavy mists of sadness and worry.”
When a reporter noticed that there were only pictures of Julie, Greg, and Mary on the walls, Bev, “suppressing a sob,” went to another room and brought out Ann's picture, explaining.
“I had to take it down and put it in the other room because I just couldn’t take it any more looking at the four of them together.”
The story went on to explain how Bev felt that adopting a baby “perhaps would help the whole family.” She and Don had applied to an agency, and then one day, received a phone call.
“We didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl until we went down and got her,” Mrs. Burr recalled yesterday. “When we got there they said, ‘Oh, does it make any difference if it's a boy or a girl?’ and we said, ‘No,’ and when they said ‘It's a girl,’ I think I was glad.
“Each day we pray for little Ann, but there is always an emptiness as there was that first night, as though there will be no answer this time. Not like other prayers, when one feels God is listening.”
For Bev, sharing news of the adoption was another opportunity to try and find Ann.
“In our hearts, we wish the whole world could stop just a moment and look next door to see if Ann is there.”
Bev was quoted as calling Laura “a perfect baby.” She would grow up to be the least-troubled of Bev's children.
Just after Bev and Don adopted Laura, the nation's most famous Catholic visited Tacoma. It was the last stop on John Kennedy's cross-country tour “to save America's heritage.” Kennedy delivered “a short, impassioned address” on preserving natural resources to 25,000 people crowded into Cheney Stadium (where searchers had looked for Ann's body two years before when it was a construction site). Bev—who was still trying to decide if her Catholic faith was a solace or not—followed the president's visit closely. Two months later, he was assassinated.
Six years to the month after Ann disappeared, the Burrs finally moved. “There was a vacant spot at the dinner table, and Laura filled that,” Bev explained. But the home she had once thought of as her “dream house” had become a daily nightmare. “I thought we had to stay there in case Ann tried to reach us,” Bev said of the house on North 14th Street, with the window someone had presumably climbed through, the front door Ann had presumably left from, and Ann's bedroom, paintings, books, and dolls. It was too painful for Bev to bear. Anytime an update appeared in the newspapers (including the happy news of the adoption), the line of cars driving slowly past the house resumed. For years, when Bev ran into the family that bought the bungalow on North 14th, she would apologize. She knew the traffic never stopped.
The Burrs moved to a large colonial home on North 28th in Tacoma. It had a huge yard and garden to occupy Bev, and a view of Commencement Bay. Bev called the police department to notify them of the new address; she also told police they were hoping to keep the same telephone number, in case Ann might call. Many of Ann's belongings, including the jumper she never got to wear to her first day of third grade, and two of her dolls, made the move to North 28th.
The newspapers showed Bev, Greg, and Laura unpacking in their new home. “Peace of Mind In Offing?” the headline speculated. The story informed readers that the move was the first for the family since Anne [sic] Marie disappeared and reminded them that it remained “one of Tacoma's most noted unsolved cases.” In later years Don and Bev would almost always be out of the country when August rolled around.
The Bundy family moved, too. Ted graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1965, and that year Johnnie, Louise, their four children, and Ted left the house on Skyline, where Ted and Doug Holt's mischievous childhood included animal abuse and an intricate series of tricks on their friends. The Bundy's returned to North Tacoma, to North 20th Street, back to the neighborhood near the University of Puget Sound campus where Louise and Ted had lived with her great-uncle, back to within blocks of both of the Burr homes. Sandi Holt, her brother, Doug, and their mother moved too—to Puyallup, east of Tacoma—to get away from Sandi's father.
Adopting Laura and moving out of the house Ann had vanished from did not heal the long-standing problems in Bev and Don's marriage. In photographs there is no affection shown between Don and Bev, at any stage in their lives. And it wasn’t that the passion was private, like it is with some couples. There was no heat that took place away from cameras. Bev just didn’t feel that way about Don. His verbal cruelty to her and his controlling ways had quickly taken a toll. He could be mean to Bev, even in front of family. One Mother's Day he ordered Bev, in front of the children, to sit in a chair and not move. He insisted Bev always wear a dress, and she wasn’t allowed to talk to the mailman. After one abbreviated driving lesson (cut short when Bev, behind the wheel of a new Packard, put it in gear, stepped on the gas, and drove off an embankment and onto a highway), Don decided once and for all Bev would never, ever be permitted to learn to drive a car. Don was “a loving father, but controlling and near-abusive,” Julie explained, years later. Yet, “he loved her dearly.”
Bev thought Don was jealous of her college education and writing aspirations. “He didn’t like me to do anything original,” she said. But, “he would do anything for his kids.” In that they were united. The loss of a child destroys many marriages, but after Ann vanished and Mary began to have mental health issues, Bev and Don were stronger together than they would have been apart. “You hear so much—it breaks up a marriage, there is finger-pointing,” said Don's brother, Raleigh. “I never heard that. They both loved the children and they held it together.” May
be they weren’t outwardly loving to each other, but their children always knew their parents would do anything for them, sometimes to the detriment of the other siblings.
Still, there was Don's bullying. “There was such tension between Bev and Don,” said Bonnie Taschler, who married Raleigh in the late 1970s. “Don would say ‘Just be quiet, Bev,’ or, ‘Beverly, I am talking,’ and he would raise a finger at her. He was incredibly jealous. If Bev wore shorts (even while gardening),” he would become upset. “We got along because I gave in,” Bev said. That may be, but those who loved her, including daughter Julie, and Raleigh Burr and Bonnie Taschler, speak of her stubbornness and headstrong nature that could make it hard to love Bev. And Bev's relationship with Julie became strained. “Every time Bev looked at Julie, she wanted to see Ann,” explained Bonnie.
“The marriage was a big mistake,” Bev said late in her life. “I could have stormed out, but the children needed me.”
Despite their differences, in every newspaper article about Ann and nearly every photograph, there's Don, in a shirt and tie instead of his customary work clothes. Many years after Ann's disappearance, Don continued to call the police department with a tip or a hunch. “He is still obsessed with his daughter's disappearance,” whoever took the call would write in the on-going police report. Bev and Don were united in their fierce loyalty to their children. It would be tested again, especially as Mary—the last person to see Ann, except for her abductor—became a teenager and young adult.
Don was mimicking behavior he had observed as a child. Don and Raleigh's father, Marion (called Frank), was controlling and a “womanizer,” according to Raleigh. At least once, Frank left his family to live with another woman. He had been a logger and commercial fisherman in Oregon. When he got the idea of forming his own company, Frank was in trouble financially. Don proposed that they be partners and sent his father five thousand dollars. Soon after their marriage, Don and Bev joined Frank in Oregon. “Dad was the experience, Don was the energy and the muscle,” Raleigh said. Later, Frank claimed he owned 51 percent of the company to Don's 49 percent, giving him the right to sell the logging operation without telling Don. There was bad blood between father and son for the rest of their lives.
Raleigh was just 13 or 14 years old when he spent the summer logging with his father and Don. He babysat for Ann, who was born December 14, 1952, in Crescent City, California, the hospital nearest to the base of their logging operation. In the summer, Bev, Don, and Ann, as well as Raleigh and his father, all lived in tents in the woods (they called it “tenting in”). In the winter, Don and Bev and the baby lived in a house in Don's hometown of Grants Pass, or in Brookings, Oregon, on the southern Oregon coast. A logging town since the turn of the century, Brookings had a moment of fame in 1942 when it became the first site in the continental U.S. to be bombed in wartime.
It is still difficult for Raleigh to reconcile the Don he knew and loved, with the Don who berated Bev from the early days of their marriage. “Don was my brother, mentor, and friend,” Raleigh said. “He was more my father than my dad was.”
It wasn’t just Bev and Don who had an awkward physical intimacy. “Don and I would hug, but Bev would shake my hand,” explained Raleigh, her brother-in-law more than 50 years. While affectionate with her children, Bev may have learned her physical detachment from her mother. “I never saw Marie touch or hug Bev,” said Bonnie. Marie and Bev “didn’t like each other,” daughter Julie explained. For one thing, “Marie would pit her grandchildren against Bev,” according to Julie. Yet Bev and her mother had something in common when each was young. Bev's parents had married when Marie was a teenager and Roy was much older. In an essay that Bev wrote in college, she remembers how frustrating it was for her mother to be young, curious, and enthusiastic, but tied down.
Although Bev and Marie were never close, things improved a little when the children gained a new grandfather. Bev's father, Roy, died in 1956. In 1962, one year after Ann vanished, Marie met Roy's cousin, George Voigt, when he came west to visit the Seattle World's Fair. George had never married, but he and Marie hit it off—he moved out from Chicago; they married and had 20 happy years before George died. He was the only grandfather Bev's children really remembered. “He had no sense of humor; we used to remark on that,” Bev said of George, “but he was a very kind man.” So Marie, who had been only 16 years old when she had married 31-year-old Roy Leach, commenced with what would surely be the best years of her life. Bev had always known that she and her brother Jerry were poor substitutes for Buddy, the first son who had died young. But Bev's children had a new grandfather to dote on them, and George somehow balanced Marie in Bev's life.
Detectives Tony Zatkovich and Ted Strand continued to work every day on the Ann Burr case. In 1963, Zatkovich was quoted in The Oregonian as saying police had a clue that they had never disclosed to the public, a common practice to help police sort real leads from false ones. “We haven’t had an opportunity to develop it yet,” he said. Was it the teenage-sized footprint found on the garden bench, or the red thread caught on the window jam, neither of which appeared in news coverage of the time? Did Ann's abductor leave something behind? A hair, saliva or blood? It would be decades before DNA could help match perpetrators with crime scenes.
The detectives decided to take a closer look at some of Don's relatives. Two months after Zatkovich's quote to The Oregonian, he and Ted Strand traveled to Yakima, southeast of Mount Rainier, to speak with a nephew of Don's. Larry C__, the son of Don's sister, was 20 years old (18 when Ann vanished). He already had a notorious reputation in the family. Bev had suggested that the detectives talk to Larry about Ann's disappearance; after all, he had already allegedly molested a young family member. Strand and Zatkovich caught up with him at his job at the Boise-Cascade Lumber Co. and took him to the Yakima Police Department to interrogate him. Larry admitted he knew the Burr children well and the layout of the Burr home. The families were often together on holidays. In 1960 and 61, he had been a high school student in Aberdeen, on the south Washington coast, about 80 miles west of Tacoma. He went back and forth to Tacoma with his grandparents, Don's mother and father, for holidays and family gatherings. His alibi for the night Ann Burr disappeared was that he was in California visiting family. When asked about the story in the family that he had molested a young relative, he broke down crying and told police that the story had been fabricated by Raleigh Burr's wife at the time, Sharon. He offered to take a polygraph to prove he had nothing to do with his young cousin's disappearance, but there is no evidence he ever did. According to his family, as an adult, Larry C__ sexually abused his own children and eventually a court order barred him from seeing them. His own mother said of him, “He’ll always be in my heart, but not my life.” There were other family members with sordid pasts. (As one relative said, “There's been a lot of sexual abuse in this family”.) In 1959, a first cousin of Don and Raleigh's was questioned when a young woman was found raped and murdered near Centralia, south of Tacoma. The man's car had broken down near the crime scene. Tacoma police talked to him about the abduction of Ann Marie Burr but he had an alibi; employment records showed he was at work that day, on the “green chain” in the peeling plant at the Allen Logging Company near Forks, Washington. On August 30 and 31 he had worked eight-and-a-half hour shifts beginning at 7 a.m. each day. Another cousin, who police described as “a queer,” had been arrested more than once on morals charges. He agreed to a polygraph examination but claimed he had never been to the Burr home or even met Bev and the children. Other relatives had serious money troubles.
Since the Burrs always kept the same phone number, they received more than their share of crank calls over the years. Sometimes Bev was embarrassed to report the incidents to police. On February 20, 1964, she received a call from a man she described as “young, using very good and precise English, no stammering or stuttering, no accent,” who said Ann was living with a family in the Phoenix area. He said he would tell her more if Bev undresse
d for him. Bev was reluctant to share the “embarrassing” details of the man's proposition with the police, but she did. They installed recording equipment in the house again, and two weeks later Detectives Strand and Zatkovich arrested a 17-year-old at Wilson High School (where Ted Bundy was a junior in high school). He admitted making the call to Bev, and said he had no more information about Ann than he had read in the newspapers. He finally confessed to making at least 150 obscene phone calls to women in the previous two or three years. He told police he didn’t receive “any particular sexual gratification from the phone calls... he did say it made him warm and sweatty [sic].”
Bev called the detectives to complain about their neighbor, Ann's teenage friend Robert Bruzas. Bev said he was spending a lot of time in a car, sitting outside on their street. The police checked it out and most likely told Bev that he was just listening to music on the car radio. They had never found proof to tie him to Ann's disappearance, despite his failing his first polygraph test.
A girl with amnesia was found in Omaha, Nebraska; it wasn’t Ann. Two boys found a bottle with a note inside, saying Ann was being held prisoner by bank robbers. Ann's name was found carved on a sandstone cliff at a roadside picnic area southwest of Tacoma, on the way to the Washington coast. Several years after Ann disappeared Bev received an envelope—empty—addressed to their new house on North 28th Street. Bev took the envelope to police, along with one of Ann's school books and begged them to compare the handwriting. Someone in the department studied the envelope and the books and concluded there was no way to tell if it was the writing of the same person, as a child and as a teenager. The books were returned to Bev.
The sense of frustration and disappointment the police faced was evident in the rare emotional comment included in the police report. “It appears that this is just another dead end in the numerous leads we have been receiving on the Ann Burr case,” one officer wrote.
Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy Page 11
