Sandi Holt, who as a young girl followed her brother Doug and his best friend, Ted Bundy, everywhere, has been disabled with a debilitating disease since her twenties. A twice-divorced mother of three, she lives alone in low-income housing. Her memories of Ann Marie Burr, who she knew from riding their bicycles, and of the boy who abused animals, Ted Bundy, are clear and strong. Sandi hasn’t spoken with her brother in more than 25 years. She limited contact with her father, too. According to her stepmother, her father finally grasped the pain he had inflicted when he sexually abused his children and their friends. As he was dying, C__ Holt would pace the floor late at night and cry out, “Oh, Sandi, what did I do to you? ”
Bev outlived almost everyone who was a part of the story of Ann's disappearance.
Donald F. Burr, Tacoma's noted architect, well-respected for his design of many homes, schools and businesses, died in 1982 at age 60. He never quit believing that his daughter, Debra Sue, was the intended kidnap victim on August 31, 1961.
Former Chief of Detectives Bob Drost—the only member of the police force who believed Ann Marie Burr was still alive—died in 1984. He had described the investigation and lack of clues as “a handful of nothing... like grabbing at clouds.” His wife said that before he died he had changed his mind and believed that Ted Bundy had killed Ann.
George Voigt, Marie Leach's second husband and Bev's father's cousin, died in 1986. Marie lived to be 95 years old. The story Bev liked to tell—about how her mother slipped on ice cream, lay on the floor for a few hours, and later died—occurred in 1994.
Larry M__, the man who had loved Bev and wanted her to call off her marriage to Don, died in 1995. He had been a well-respected insurance agent in Tacoma, a lodge member, a husband, father, and grandfather. Years later, when Bev was moving to the blue house, Julie found Larry's obituary. “She apparently treasured it, and had it hidden on her shelf in her bedroom under some knickknack,” Julie said.
Ted Strand died in 1997 following heart surgery. He had smoked for 55 years. After retirement, he and Tony Zatkovich met at least once a week for lunch and to talk about the only major case they never solved. “He was a hell of a cop,” Zatkovich told the News Tribune after Strand's death.
Richard Raymond McLish, the habitual car thief who claimed to have wrapped Ann in a quilt and buried her in an Oregon bean field, died in 2000. The native American had spent much of his adult life in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. A brief obituary mentioned his “smile and constant willingness to help.”
Tony Zatkovich not only outlived his best friend and his partner on the force, he outlived his ex-wife and his second wife. He died in 2004, just days before he turned 91. He had gone back to the police department one last time and asked to see the Ann Marie Burr file, case #176685. At least half of it was missing. He was furious. “It killed dad,” Dick Zatkovich says of the sorrow his father felt over not solving the case. Bev added the newspaper obituaries for both detectives to her albums.
Don Burr died in 2003 at age 78. His illness leading up to his death was hard on Bev. Bonnie Taschler once asked Bev if she and Don had grown closer before he died. “We shed a lot of tears,” Bev told her. Bev also told her that she “had always loved someone else.” Bev and Don were married 52 years.
Johnnie Bundy died in 2007. He had been married to Louise for 56 years. His obituary said he was the father of five, grandfather of six, and great-grandfather of 15. None of his children were mentioned by name, including his most famous son. Ted's grandfather, Samuel Cowell, died while Ted was on death row. Louise told a reporter that she didn’t know how much her father knew about his grandson's crimes. One family member says they hid newspaper articles from Cowell. Louise said the family just never talked about it.
There was less chance now that Bev Burr and Louise Bundy would run into each other at a grocery store or on a bus trip. Bev—who had vowed never to move to an apartment or to senior citizen housing because she wouldn’t be able to garden—was trapped in her house. Louise would soon move from her home on North 20th into an assisted living facility. Did she keep albums and scrapbooks, as Bev did, in order to try and comprehend what happened to her first born? In preparation for Louise's move, her daughter said the family had finally destroyed letters and newspaper articles Louise and Johnnie had saved over the years. Louise Bundy was 88 when she died in December, 2012.
Bev had regrets. She regretted that she taught her children to trust people. She regretted that she didn’t let Ann sleep at a friend's house that August night and that she sent her two daughters upstairs to bed alone. She regretted sleeping through Ann's abduction. She regretted that she didn’t become a writer and couldn’t love Don enough. And she had secrets. Why did she continue to say that she had been a “terrible person?” Was she, as some family members believed, just being dramatic? Or did she blame herself for her daughter's disappearance? Bev internalized the pain and grief she carried for years. It bled from her when she cut blackberry bushes, shoplifted, and was so desperate to change her life that she would have left her family for a convent.
After Ann vanished, Bev started Julie in religious education classes and moved her to the school at St. Patrick's. Julie didn’t want to leave Grant Elementary School where she was in second grade and Ann was supposed to have been in third. “I remember thinking my mom made us convert and change schools because she felt she was being punished from God for not following her Catholic beliefs. I’m not sure how I arrived at that.” In a newspaper article in 1963, around the time of Laura's adoption, Bev implied that God hadn’t been listening to her prayers.
Grief experts say that guilt stops the healing process, and ambiguous loss—the kind without a body to bury and mourn—is the most devastating kind because it is incomplete. The greater the ambiguity, the greater the anxiety, depression, and family stress. Some people survive loss by clinging to denial and hope. Louise Bundy did. But Bev, who knew from the early moments of August 31, 1961, that she would never see her daughter again, only pretended to have hope. She pretended for the newspapers, for her other children, and probably for Ann. Bev never romanticized Ann's homecoming. She was incapable of living in denial and was the worst for it. Ayn Rand wrote, “Guilt is a rope that wears thin.” Bev's rope wore very thin.
Beverly Burr died in her home on North Proctor Street on September 13, 2008. The notes imploring those who loved her not to call an ambulance or take her to the hospital and not to forget about her cat Thomas were still on the counter and the refrigerator. Her wishes were honored. Her children, except for Mary, spent time with her at the end of her life. She was the mother of five, grandmother of seven, and great-grandmother of three.
Bev remained ambiguous about her Catholic faith. She pretended it was a comfort, but didn’t depend on it. The week she died one of her caregivers left a religious pamphlet at Bev's bedside. If Bev read it, it might have provided solace. It read: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary work.
14
Explaining Ted
TRYING TO EXPLAIN TED IS NOT EXPLAINING AWAY TED, or forgiving him. Regardless of what childhood or genetic influences shaped him, he does not deserve sympathy. To the end of his life he was without remorse and his words for his victims and their families still have the power to shock. “What's one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?” he remarked when discussing his crimes. Ted went so far as to tell former investigator Bob Keppel that there were people who deserved to be raped and murdered.
When Ted told psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis that everyone else wanted to know what he did, but she was the only one who wanted to know why, he was correct. Police in at least six states and the FBI were desperate to know when he started killing, how he lured his victims, how many girls and women he killed, where he disposed of their bodies, and if he was responsible for other missing women and unsolved crimes. Dr. Lewis, and now another generation of researchers, hope to better understand the minds of serial killers. They are convinced murderers are made, not
born.
If Ted Bundy was on death row today, we’d know a lot more about him. Until the 1980s, the study of the causes of crime focused on socio-economic factors, including poverty. When Dr. Lewis first met Ted in 1986, she was in the middle of conducting research on juveniles condemned to death. In one of her studies, she compared juveniles on death row to incarcerated delinquents who did not commit violent offenses. She found the juveniles on death row had been physically abused as children; they had a mental illness; they had a close relative who was mentally ill; they committed violent acts during childhood; and there was neurological impairment caused by a head injury.
Do all children who are abused, or are bipolar, or sustain a head injury, grow up to be killers? No, but they are predictors of future violence if a young person suffers from all three.
About the same time Dr. Lewis was conducting her research, Canadian psychologist Robert Hare was deep into his study of psychopaths. Building on the work of Dr. Hervey Checkley in the 1940s, Hare developed the PCLR (Psychopath Checklist-Revised) a clinical rating scale used to assess psychopathy. What Checkley called insincerity, Hare called glibness and superficial charm. Also on his list of psychopathic traits are: a grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; conning and manipulation of others; lack of a conscience; lack of remorse or guilt; an overall shallow affect; callousness and lack of empathy; failure to accept responsibility for one's actions; impulsivity; juvenile delinquency; tendency to boredom; and early behavioral problems. Studies of unattached children, children who haven’t bonded with the parental figures in their life, have their own checklist, a kind of junior version of Hare's checklist. It includes cruelty to others; phoniness; speech pathology; preoccupation with fire, blood or gore; and pathological lying. There is little doubt that Ted today would be considered by many to be a psychopath. Dr. Lewis doesn’t use psychopathy as a diagnosis and considers its definition “loose.” Other psychiatrists share her concern.
But if this is how a psychopath behaves, how did he get that way? (And it is almost always a “he”—female psychopaths are much rarer.)
Dr. Kent Kiehl grew up in Tacoma sitting around the dinner table talking about Ted Bundy's crimes with his father, an editor for the Tacoma News Tribune. Now an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of New Mexico, Dr. Kiehl is scanning the brains of a thousand inmates a year at 12 state prisons to learn more about the roots of psychopathy. Dr. Kiehl, who studied with Robert Hare, said there is no evidence that a traumatic childhood (including molestation), or a traumatic head injury, make someone a killer. Instead, he is focusing on abnormalities he has found in their paralimbic systems, the network of brain regions involved in processing emotions and inhibitions. Kiehl hopes that, someday, there will be a drug that targets the region of the brain involved.
Several studies are looking at the possibility of a genetic component to psychopathy (which was also known as sociopathy, and now is used interchangeably with antisocial personality disorder). Even Ted suggested that he might have inherited a genetic predisposition to aggressive behavior. If he had donated his brain to science, as Dr. Lewis hoped he would, who knows what secrets might have been revealed.
Other studies of what is called “a high-risk gene,” a variant of the MAOA gene associated with violence, indicate that, combined with child abuse, the gene “increases one's chances of being convicted of a violence offense by more than 400 percent.”
An FBI study found that childhood experiences are critical to understanding serial killers. The 2002 study found that animal abuse is an important predictor of future violence. So is family dysfunction. Nearly 70 percent of the convicts the FBI looked at came from families with alcohol-abuse. Fifty percent had been severely beaten; some had been sexually abused; many had family members with criminal histories; and three quarters reported “psychological” abuse, which includes indifference. In most cases, early “bizarre behavior” by children was ignored by their families.
What does not appear on the lists of predictors is pornography. Ted Bundy liked to warn America about pornography and the influence of the media. He told James Dobson, in the infamous video interview taped the night before he was executed: “I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me. And without exception, without question, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography.” Bob Keppel, Ann Rule, Stephen Michaud and others thought Ted was grandstanding. Experts say pornography may shape fantasies, but it doesn’t make someone a serial killer.
Studies of head injuries now extend to former professional football players. Twenty NFL veterans have been found to have the same trauma-induced brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease caused by multiple concussions and other forms of head injury. Once found mostly in boxers, its symptoms can include a deteriorating mental state, memory loss, depression, dementia, as well as poor impulse control and abusive behavior.
The first time Ted had a mental examination was when he was awaiting trial for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. A University of Utah clinical psychologist spent two hours with Ted and administered six tests, including a Rorschach and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory exam. Ted was vehemently denying his guilt, and the psychologist stated that he was forced to conclude that Ted was a “normal person.” Later, after being found guilty, Ted was given a more extensive evaluation. Still at Utah State Prison, Ted participated in 50 hours of tests. During a skull X-ray a small benign tumor was discovered in his left sinus passage. An electroencephalogram (or EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain was “completely unremarkable,” and doctors found “no evidence of organic brain disease.” However, a prison psychiatrist did determine that Ted had an “anti-social personality,” including a lack of guilt feelings, callousness, rationalization, withdrawn and other factors “consistent with a schizoid personality.” (Not related to schizophrenia, schizoid suggests an aloof, cold and indifferent personality.) There was also a scar on his scalp. Other tests, administered when Ted was on death row in Florida, found a “slightly abnormal” EEG; an intelligence test showed an “extraordinary gap” between his verbal I.Q. and his poor ability to see spatial relationships, something Dr. Lewis says can be a dysfunction of the central nervous system. According to the FBI, the autopsy of his brain found no abnormalities, but experts say it would not necessarily have detected a neuropsychological dysfunction (such as bipolar disease). The postmortem also noted the scar on his scalp; there's no way of knowing if it dated from childhood, from a 1973 ski accident, or had any significance.
Ted knew there was something wrong. He told his longtime girlfriend, “There is something the matter with me.” He called himself a vampire, because of how much he enjoyed his late night roaming.
And those around him—at least those not in denial—saw abnormal behavior from the time he was young. He arranged the knives around his teenage aunt to scare her. Sandi Holt saw him drag little girls into the woods and urinate on them. He abused animals, and Holt saw his eyes change as his irises darkened. His friends saw sudden outbursts of rage. His grade school teachers said he had trouble controlling his temper. He hit a friend on the head with a stick.
His great-aunt witnessed Ted in “an altered state.” An investigator for the Florida public defender said he twice saw Ted “turn into another person,” right in front of him. During these episodes Ted's skin changed color, he emitted a strange odor, and he became incoherent. Michaud and Aynesworth noticed how close together his eyes appeared sometimes. Attorney Polly Nelson said that when Ted described a murder he committed in Idaho, he went into a “trance” and said he had experienced “frenzies” when killing.
Ted came close to having a multiple personality disorder. Now called Dissociative Identity Disorder, it is thought to be a coping mechanism to help a person dissociate himself from memories of an experience that are too traumatic to deal with consciously. At its most severe, it causes multiple pe
rsonalities. A person with multiple personalities is usually unaware of their other selves. Ted always seemed aware of what he sometimes called “the entity” or “the other Ted.” He told Nelson that he heard “the other Ted” talking to him, and the cycle of drinking, stalking a victim, and committing murder would begin. Ted told Dr. Lewis: “And I’m not saying that I was a multiple personality. I don’t know. All I know is that this other part of myself seemed to have a voice, and seemed to have a need.” He went on to tell her that he was “not totally unconscious of, or unaware” of the “entity,” but he was in some kind of altered state at those times.
Those who knew Ted are still trying to understand how he became a man that even he said society should be protected from.
“I’ve never gone for the ‘bad seed’ theory, but I do believe you can have a predisposition to killing,” Ann Rule said. And she believes that a combination of a predisposition to violence and abuse can cause some kind of psychological break.
Dr. Ron Holmes, the serial killer researcher Ted “confessed” the abduction and murder of Ann Marie Burr to, said it is natural to want to find a cause, whether it is genes or brain damage. “But we’re only studying the people who get caught,” he said. “There are some (psychopaths) who never get into trouble, so the sample is skewed. The only thing they have in common is an overwhelming compulsion to kill. Where it arises from, I don’t know.” Holmes’ theory is that something happens early in childhood, probably a head injury. “There's just something about these people, they are wired differently and have an overarching need to kill.”
Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy Page 18
