Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  “Did he hurt anyone?”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Why is this happening?”

  “Why does God hate all of us?”

  By then her mother was crying. Sissy let the phone fall into the cradle of the receiver. Her tears were twin streams, just moving down her cheeks and dropping onto the floor.

  “Mommy,” Grace said, rushing to comfort her. “Daddy?”

  Conner was away on a business trip.

  “No. Worse than that, baby. Something terrible has happened.”

  “Mommy?”

  Sissy steadied herself, her hands finding the back of a dining chair. She bent close to her daughter and held her, and then pressed her lips to her ear.

  “Do not be afraid,” she whispered. “Ted escaped.”

  Later the “memory” would become more complete as the bits and pieces of Ted Bundy’s story emerged and filled her memory bank. Ted’s incarceration had been short-lived. He was transferred from Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, an hour away to the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, Colorado, for a preliminary hearing. Ted was full-on Ted then—the Ted he wanted the world to see. He was acting as his own lawyer and in doing so was granted special—and, ultimately, foolish—privileges. He was able to shed the shackles and handcuffs that prisoners wore—items he said that were not only prejudicial, but made it impossible for him to maneuver around the second-floor law library. Moments later, the Pacific Northwest’s least favorite son jumped from the window, landing on the ground and disappearing into the mundane spring day.

  Later when she played the exchange between her and her mother, Grace escalated her vocabulary to concepts beyond her age.

  “They’ll catch him, right?” she asked when her mother told her what happened.

  Sissy had pulled herself together and looked into her daughter’s brown eyes and nodded.

  “Yes. I think so. The police know that they can’t let him be free. No one is safe. They told me they have already set up roadblocks all around Aspen. He can’t go far.”

  The next morning the Tacoma News Tribune ran a story on the front page:

  IS TED BUNDY THE REINCARNATION OF HARRY HOUDINI?

  That brought a memory, too. Sissy immediately called the newspaper and screamed at the nice girl who answered the phone, telling her that in no uncertain terms the paper was glorifying a monster and in doing so diminishing the unspeakable evil that he’d done to an untold number of women and girls.

  “If he killed your daughter,” Sissy said, almost screaming into the phone after being transferred to the city editor’s desk, “I doubt you’d be writing headlines like that!”

  The first week of summer had not been as Grace had dreamed it would be. There were no trips to Titlow Beach and the massive saltwater swimming pool there. Her mother didn’t take her to Point Defiance for the picnic that she’d promised for that first Saturday. Instead, they sat around the house staring at the phone and playing Chinese checkers for six days—six days in which her mother ratcheted up her obsession with the man she was sure had been her daughter’s killer.

  Still later, when it came on the news that Ted Bundy had been apprehended again, it had not been because of fantastic police work. It had once again been a routine traffic stop that had been the suspected serial killer’s undoing. He’d been picked up in Aspen driving a stolen car erratically with a sprained ankle. He had stolen a rifle and taken maps, food, and whatever else he could get his hands on. If he’d had a grand plan, it was a failed and ill-conceived one.

  No one knew it at the time, of course, but it wouldn’t be his last escape.

  In Seattle and Tacoma, indeed all over the Pacific Northwest, pockets of people—law enforcement and civilians—were caught up in everything Ted. Sissy had her group of parents and siblings of murdered children and they were busy plastering photographs of Tricia and Ted on bulletin boards in supermarkets and telephone poles throughout Tacoma.

  Under the black-and-white photos were six one-syllable words:

  DID YOU SEE HIM WITH HER?

  When news came that Ted’s 1968 VW bug had been recovered from the teen in Midvale, Utah, to whom he’d sold it, the O’Hares all brightened and braced themselves. Sissy considered the VW a “kind of mobile crime scene” and she was convinced that if Tricia had gone with Ted, it had been in that evil car. She was equally sure that if Tricia had gone with him, she had not gone on her own accord. She knew better than to get into a stranger’s car. When FBI lab technicians examined the car—literally every inch of it under a microscope—they managed to recover some vital evidence. Among the dust and debris of a car that had been all over the west, the lab collected a number of hairs matching two dead girls from Utah and Colorado; in addition to those samples, they found one that was certainly a match with Mandy Deirdre, the girl who got away.

  The living witness, as she became known.

  Mandy didn’t speak of what had happened often—that was one of the distinguishing markers of a real Ted victim. The wannabes, those who needed the attention, were always there in front of a reporter’s open notebook, or the camera of TV news crew. Mandy didn’t clamber to be in front of anyone. She had come through the darkness of what-if, and didn’t want to revel in it. Because of that genuine reticence, Sissy never phoned her to find out just what was going through her mind or if Ted had mentioned her daughter’s name. It seemed like too much of an intrusion. Mandy was lucky to be alive and that kind of luck didn’t need to be sullied by the curious, or even those desperate to know something. Anything.

  In early October of 1975, potential Teds were placed in a row under the harsh glare of a jailhouse lineup. Mandy, all ninety-five pounds of her, did what no one had been able to do before. She fingered him as her assailant. There was no hesitation, like there often is when reality is thrown in a victim’s face. Instead, just the confidence of a young woman with the burden of stopping evil.

  “That’s the police officer who stopped me,” she said.

  Witnesses in Colorado made additional positive IDs of Ted as the stranger who’d been lurking around the high school where Candy Detrick was last seen alive.

  Ted, it seemed, was charged with kidnapping Mandy and attempted criminal assault and, as they would always do throughout his life, his parents stood by him. Johnnie and Louise came up with the fifteen thousand dollars sought by the court and he was released to await trial in Washington.

  Grace was a girl then, but she could never forget how her mother had reacted to the news that Ted had been freed on bond. That was the day they needed a new TV.

  Sissy stood up from the sofa and yelled at the TV.

  “Can you believe it?” she asked, her voice nearly a scream.

  She picked up her husband’s trophy and slammed it down on top of the walnut console. She was so angry. So hurt. She didn’t shatter the glass, but the tube flickered and the picture faded to that measly pattern that came on the channels for which there was no reception.

  It was the first time Grace had seen her mother be aggressive like that.

  “Mommy, are you okay?”

  “How could I be okay? How could any of us be okay? He’s out. He’s going to kill another girl. Mark my words.”

  Grace unplugged the TV. Just in case.

  Sissy went for her coat and an umbrella. The weather had been nasty for two weeks, sending a cold rain over the faded fall foliage.

  “Mommy, where are you going?”

  “Come with me. We’re going over to the Bundys’. I’m going to put them on notice. I don’t care what they say. I don’t even care if they call the police. In fact, I hope they do.”

  Grace followed her mother to the car and climbed into the passenger seat. Sissy didn’t even wait for her to buckle up; instead she just put the car in gear and drove.

  “I’m sorry about the TV,” she said.

  “I don’t care, Mommy. Daddy might not be happy about it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. But you know what?
He gets to go to work every day, away from the news, away from Tricia’s empty room. He doesn’t have to face the reminders twenty-four hours a day.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were at the Skyline Drive address where Ted had lived in his last year of high school. Police cars and a TV crew from KVOS were outside the Bundy home, a nice wood-clad house with small, almost eyehole, windows in front.

  Sissy parked behind the news van.

  “Looks like I’m not the only one with the need to talk to the Bundys,” she said.

  Grace followed her mom.

  A police officer stopped them.

  “Are you friends of the family?” he asked.

  Sissy shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t say friends.”

  “What’s your business here?”

  “I want to talk to Louise and Johnnie,” she said.

  “So you do know them?”

  “No. I think Ted murdered my daughter—her older sister.” She pointed to Grace, who just stood there saying nothing, taking in all the drama around her.

  “I understand, ma’am,” he said, “But you don’t need to be here.”

  “Is it against the law?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s just that there’s no point in it. Ted’s not here. The Bundys aren’t coming out. We just want everyone to go away, leave them alone.”

  “Leave them alone?” Sissy asked, he eyes popping. “They helped to make him into whatever it is that you want to call him. I think they should come out. They should face everyone and tell us why it is they want to support a murderer.”

  “He’s their son. It just is the way it is. Please go home.”

  Sissy stood there, her pant legs wicking up water from a mud puddle.

  “How is it that I have to go home to an empty house, a room without my baby anymore because of him?”

  The officer looked over at Grace, who stood next to her mother, shivering in the cold October air.

  “Because you have her to think about,” he said, indicating Grace standing quietly next to her mom.

  Sissy looked down at Grace, and their eyes locked. She noticed for the first time that Grace was freezing. She didn’t have a jacket or a sweater. She was shaking and her face was streaked with rain.

  “Tell Louise I hope her son rots in hell, but before he does that, I want you—any of you—to make him tell me what he did with my Tricia! Do you understand? Do you copy?”

  The officer seemed to.

  “We’re together on this,” he said. “I promise.” He looked around the Skyline Drive house, the cars, the people, the media. The buzzing of people all there for a reason, but none greater than the woman and her daughter. If anyone deserved answers, he was all but certain, it was that mother.

  CHAPTER 26

  A memory that could never ever be erased from Sissy O’Hare’s brain, no matter how much she would have preferred, came ten days after the ordeal began. It started with a phone call.

  It was Harold Masters from the Tacoma Police Department on the line. Detective Masters had been handling Tricia’s case since the first real full day of her vanishing.

  “Mrs. O’Hare?” the detective asked. It was immediately apparent that his voice was devoid of any hopefulness.

  “Yes, it’s me,” she said.

  The detective cleared his throat. “Mrs. O’Hare, can you and Conner meet me at the station?”

  “This doesn’t sound good,” Sissy said, sliding backward into a chair, the air emptying from her lungs.

  “We don’t know for sure,” he said, again as flatly as possible, without hope.

  Sissy looked over at her husband, who had set down the News Tribune and was watching her face fall. “We can be there in twenty minutes,” she said.

  Detective Masters’s sympathetic eyes were no longer as penetrating as they had been in all of his encounters with Conner and Sissy O’Hare. Indeed, when he met them by the front desk at the police department they barely landed on either of the missing girl’s parents. It was obvious before a single word was uttered that the detective was about to say something that he didn’t want to say and that the O’Hares most certainly didn’t want to hear.

  From the outset, Conner was shaking. He put his arm around Sissy, more for his benefit than hers. She was oddly quiet, stoic.

  “You found her?” he asked.

  Sissy stood there mute.

  “Let’s go in here,” Det. Masters said, gesturing for them to follow into the open doorway of an interview room they had visited two days after Tricia’s vanishing from campus. Tricia’s best friend, Carrie, had joined them in that interview, one that yielded very little new information and plenty more tears. Carrie kept saying over and over that it was her fault for wanting to have some alone time with the guy she had set her sights on.

  “Tricia went to get something to eat or something.... I never saw her again,” she said. “It was my fault. All my fault.”

  Outwardly, the O’Hares didn’t argue the merits of her guilty conscience. They patted the teenager on the shoulder and tried to calm her to see if their daughter’s decidedly selfish best friend had a clue about what really happened to Tricia. Inside Sissy’s head, a refrain ran on an endless loop.

  It is your fault! You stupid girl!

  That had been more than a week ago. And with each day, as Xerox-copied flyers with Sissy’s smiling senior portrait went up all over Pierce County, hope faded. By the end of that eighth day, there wasn’t a bus stop or telephone pole that hadn’t been stapled, tacked, or even duct-taped with Tricia O’Hare’s photograph and the loud proclamation: REWARD. Search parties organized by Boy Scouts and search-and-rescue groups from as far away as Spokane methodically inched their way across a large empty field near PLU, turning up a dead cat and another woman’s purse, but nothing more. The police led by Detective Masters had worked around the clock, of course, but it was as if Tricia just walked off the face of the earth.

  Now you see her, now you don’t.

  The detective folded his dark tan hands and set them on the table.

  “A body has been found,” he said, his eyes now gliding over both of the parents.

  “Is it our Tricia?” Conner asked, his eyes already flooding.

  “We’re not sure. We need to make an identification.”

  Sissy spoke up. “So you don’t know.” She stopped herself before adding, if it is her?

  “But you know enough to bring us here,” Conner said, fighting back tears.

  Detective Masters nodded. “Yes,” he said, his voice so soft it might not have been heard in a normal conversation. This was far from normal. “I’m very sorry,” he said, “but we do think we’ve found your daughter.”

  “Where? Where?” Conner asked, putting his arm around Sissy and holding her close as he finally let completely go and convulsed into tears. “Not our little girl.”

  “A fisherman and his son found the body just up from the bank of the Puyallup.”

  Sissy later told her victims’ families support group that she looked at the detective’s mouth as he spoke, trying to decipher what he was saying. It seemed like his words were coming at her in some strange foreign language. Nothing he said seemed to compute whatsoever.

  She stared at Conner.

  Why is he crying? What happened?

  Later, Sissy learned, her experience was not so uncommon. She had shut down, a defense mechanism to stop her from experiencing the deepest pain a mother might feel. Nothing any mother could face could be worse than the realization that her baby was really gone.

  “I’ll need a family member to identify the body,” he said.

  “Where is she?” Sissy asked, now retrieving some of what was being said. Conner was a mess; she could see that she had to be the one. “I’ll go.”

  “Are you sure, Mrs. O’Hare?” the detective asked, knowing that her husband was in no condition to do what needed to be done.

  And that was the second memory, the trek in to the morgue, seeing her daughter while Conn
er waited in the hallway, his face in his hands. Tricia was laying on some kind of a table with wheels as she was pushed in front of a window, a light on, and an attendant in scrubs peeling back a pale green sheet. A light went on and the image of her daughter not as she’d been in life, but slightly bloated, a whitish gray pallor over her skin, came into view.

  Sissy O’Hare looked over at the detective and motioned that she was going to be sick. She spun around and reached for the door, but there wasn’t enough time. Though it felt as if she hadn’t eaten for days, she began to vomit. At first it was simply that horrendous noise that accompanies dry heaves. It is the kind of noise that sometimes induces others to follow suit. A second later, a foul fountain came up out of her throat and splattered against the floor. In any other another time, Sissy would have been mortified beyond words by what had transpired. She was a woman in complete control. She was tidy. Her manners were impeccable. She was the strand-of-pearls-wearing gardener, for goodness sake.

  “This isn’t my Tricia,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “A mother knows her baby. Yes, I’m sure,” she said, standing there crying, hunched over a coagulating pool of vomit, wishing that God would take her right then, too. The love of her life was gone. The baby she’d rocked since birth. Gone. Everything good. Gone.

  Who could have done this?

  It was a question that she’d later convince herself that she had to answer on her own.

  Those two moments—learning her daughter was missing and the viewing of the lifeless remains of someone else’s little girl—could only be supplanted by the memory she wished for more than anything. She wanted to live long enough to savor the death of the man or men who were responsible for the cruelest deed. Before going to sleep each night, Sissy O’Hare found a private moment away from Conner, then later, from Grace, and said a silent prayer.

  Dear God, it is wrong for me to wish harm to anyone, but please answer me and spare my broken heart by making the Tricia’s murderer pay for his crimes with his own blood. Forgive me for wishing another human being to suffer, but I cannot be a stronger, better person here. I want him to die a slow, painful death. I want him to feel whatever she felt times a million. God, please hear my prayers. Please show some mercy on my broken heart and release me from the torment of a killer walking free to cause more harm.