The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History (26 page)

Although still nervous about such things, Liz did make the call to the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office. When she asked to speak with someone familiar with the Carol DaRonch abduction, none other than Captain Hayward himself picked up the phone.14 When Liz explained the situation and expressed her fears about Bundy, Hayward assured her that he'd been checked out when the Seattle authorities contacted the department after he first moved to Utah. Nothing indicated to him that Bundy was anything other than a law student. He told her not to worry about it; everything looked okay to him."

Hayward was right. To the casual observer, nothing appeared out of place in Ted Bundy's life. He was a student of the law. He had a reputation for being both politically active and well-respected for his work back home. And as far as his social life was concerned, both in Washington State and Utah, he was well-liked and highly regarded. Bundy was bright, articulate, politically savvy, witty, friendly, and always seemed to stand out from the crowd as one who could be counted upon. It was a brilliant facade, and he had worked very hard to perfect it.

The winter of 1975 continued to inch very slowly towards spring. For his part, Mike Fisher followed up on every apparent lead, but any evidence pointing to the killer of Caryn Campbell was evading him, at least for the present time. Theodore Bundy, feeling almost god-like in his ability to outsmart law enforcement, continued as a well-liked law student and well-liked (for the most part) housemate of 565 First Avenue, and may very well have added to the body count in Utah or the surrounding states during the month of February, as he waited to get back up to speed as the premier killing machine of the Northwest.

In Washington State, the authorities were no closer to catching a killer they now feared (correctly) had moved on. Despite a mammoth investigation which was continuing without letup, there were no solid answers that investigators could present to a still fearful and highly-charged public, neither had all of the missing women presumed to be victims been located. But that was about to change.

On Saturday, March 1, 1975, Bundy's second body dump site would be discovered by two forestry students on the slopes of Taylor Mountain. For the families of the missing, it was the inevitable crushing of that last bit of hope of ever seeing, or holding, or kissing a loved one again. The only positive aspect for them was that the discovery allowed the real grieving process to begin. For the investigators, however, the discovery held out the possibility of evidence; evidence which could lead them straight to their killer.

So when Bob Keppel answered his phone on that pivotal day, it was a call he had expected to receive sometime, even hoped to receive; he just didn't know when or from what jurisdiction that call might come. "You have a found skull off highway 18," the radio room operator informed him. "Two citizens will meet you where the power lines cross, four miles south of 1-90." The spot where this macabre find was located is "1,000 feet northeast of the intersection of the power line road and highway 18 ."16

Keppel breathed a sigh of relief. The investigation would remain in the hands of the King County Police, who had learned from the intense investigation at Issaquah how important it was to do a proper and methodical search of the crime scene." Perhaps correctly, Bob Keppel didn't believe another department would invest the time and manpower to conduct the type of extensive (and for the participants, exhausting) search that could lead them to this highly elusive killer.

Now it was in their ballpark. Whatever was waiting for them in the way of clues would now have to be ferreted out by his crew, and Keppel was more than up to the task. For the next eight days, over two hundred searchers would tackle rocks, branches, slippery wet leaves, hidden depressions, and all the natural obstacles of the wild, all of which welcome the decaying remains of living things, and vigorously resist giving them up.

The killer had taken his victims as intact human beings, but this is not how they would be found. Only the lower mandible of Lynda Ann Healy was discovered at Taylor Mountain. Because her skull was not located, police could not determine if she had suffered the crushing blow that had now become a trademark of the monster.

In what was a surprise discovery for some, the cracked skull and lower mandible of Kathy Parks of Corvallis, Oregon, was also a part of the Taylor Mountain find. Being some 250 miles away from where she was last seen on that warm summer night of May 6, 1974, only added to the gruesome nature of the crime. That the killer reached out so far to claim a victim was yet another example of his unpredictability. Investigators noted that all of her upper teeth were missing.

During the search, Keppel would literally stumble upon the grinning skull of Susan Rancourt.'8 Rancourt had suffered blunt force trauma to the back of her skull, and her mandible was broken in three places. Her long blond hair was found detached nearby.

The cranium, minus the lower mandible, of Brenda Ball was located. A portion of the right side of her skull was missing. It was the opinion of the medical examiner "that this was not caused by an animal.""

As body dumps go, Taylor Mountain was not a substantial find, and it was immediately apparent to Keppel's people that this was merely the location chosen by the killer to discard the heads of his victims. Out there somewhere, they correctly reasoned, were the rest of the remains of these four women. It was a stark discovery, and one that wouldn't sit well with the public.

All of this brought a smile to Bundy's face when he read of the discoveries on Taylor Mountain. He felt a special kinship with the ground Keppel and the others were searching, and they were no closer to catching him, even as they gathered the broken and smashed skulls of the women he had killed. He alone knew the location of the rest of the remains, and that would remain his for all time. He was completely unconcerned about the frenzied activity in Washington. He had buried the bodies, and he could just as easily have taken a shovel into the woods and done so with the heads, keeping them from prying eyes forever. There was no real evidence in any field in which he'd ever dragged a body. He had made it a rule early on that all clothing, purses, makeup bags, backpacks, and every physical item connected to the victim - with the exception of the occasional beaded necklace-were placed in plastic garbage bags and thrown into dumpsters, or otherwise discarded in locations far from the deceased. This would remove from the scene those things which could be so easily contaminated with hairs, fingerprints and other connecting evidence. Let the police gather bones to their heart's content, he reasoned. It would never lead them any closer to him. He was, in his demented state, quite happy with his actions thus far.

On Friday, March 14, 1975, Bundy was again on the move. Having gassed up in the city, he headed north out of Utah on 1-80, stopping again for gas (and probably something to eat) later that day in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and filling up again in Laramie, as his Chevron credit card record reveals. It was the beginning of the weekend, and he loved to abduct and kill on weekends. He had been savoring the experience of murdering Caryn Campbell so effortlessly and efficiently at Colorado's Wildwood Inn. He wanted to duplicate this achievement at another unsuspecting ski resort that like Snowmass would be teeming with people who were strangers to each other. He would be traveling a long way to accomplish this, but that was of no concern to him, as his life had evolved into constant trolling for victims.

At Cheyenne, he turned south on 25 on his way to Denver. Past Fort Collins, past Longmont, Bundy would weave his way through the many little cities which make up the greater suburban areas of Denver, where he would again stop for gas at Golden, a small town west of Colorado's largest city. Here he would pick up 1-70, where he'd head west to his predetermined destination.

As he drove the very scenic I-70, the thoughts of this madman with the carefully-crafted outer shell probably turned to murder; not just the murder yet to be, but a celebratory mental excursion into the past fifteen months and what that time meant to him. In the annals of predatory assault and homicide, he was setting records and covering new ground, and he knew it. The old Theodore Bundy must have seemed rather strange to him, as one might inwardly shudder at the naivete of youth when revisiting the past.

Not understanding his own psychopathology, he reveled in the freedom of the hunt, for he understood that all things and all people were his for the taking. Driving through the mountains of this beautiful and picturesque state at a time when spring and the sense of new life are just around the corner, all of his meditations were on death. Meditations that included the best way to bring his victims to the point of expiration, and how to enjoy them as they were dying. It was a way of thinking absolutely foreign to almost every other human on the planet. He was very much the alien among us, an alien driven by intense and unyielding homicidal cravings.

Those who fell prey to Theodore Bundy did so, more than anything, by chance. He had no control over who'd be at Lake Sammamish that July 14, or at CWSC, where he abducted Susan Rancourt. What if Donna Manson had been walking with a friend when she headed for the concert at Evergreen the night she disappeared? What if Caryn Campbell had been holding the hands of Gadowski's children as they exited the elevator? What if Georgann Hawkins simply told the hobbling stranger no? It was all so very random. It was so much a matter of chance.

And so it was on March 15, 1975, Ted Bundy rolled his beige Volkswagen Bug into the small community of Vail, Colorado. He had never met, nor had he heard the name of Julie Cunningham. But by chance, his path would cross Cunningham's, and by momentarily believing what she saw, she'd be immortalized as one of his victims.

It was a little after 9:00 P.M. on that fateful and cold Colorado evening that Julie Cunningham, a pretty twenty-six-year-old, left her shared apartment and began what should have been a short stroll to a nearby tavern, where she'd have a drink or two with her roommate. As a part-time ski instructor who was also employed at a local sporting goods store, Julie was a responsible young woman who wouldn't have stood up her friend for anything. Neither was she the type of person to suddenly leave the area without a good reason, and without informing friends, relatives and employers of her plans. So it was understandable that her odd disappearance created a deep sense of trepidation among those who knew her. The mystery, which wouldn't be solved for many years, was classic Bundy.

Julie Cunningham had the misfortune of seeing Bundy walking rather haltingly on crutches while fumbling with ski equipment (probably boots). After parking his car, Bundy would later explain, "I walked back toward the center of town, up the road and I walked slowly, looking at the passerbys."20 After a moment, he spotted Julie Cunningham. "Coming down the road towards me, she was alone and walking on the outside of the parked cars.... I used the crutch and fumbled with the boots and started to cross the street and I asked her help. I told her that I needed a little help to get to my car, it was parked only a short distance down the road in the direction she was walk- ing."21

When she agreed to help him, Bundy said he "started with a little small talk about getting off work, and hurting my leg skiing."" Leading Julie to the passenger side of his VW, he asked her to help him by putting the crutches in his car. "When I opened the door and she bent over," Bundy recalled, "I hit her in the head and pushed her into the car, she was unconscious, and as I drove away I put handcuffs on her."23 Quickly getting onto 1-70, Bundy drove for a time before exiting onto a state road, which he followed until he came to what he thought was a small lake, then he got off onto an unpaved road. This particular setting was partially secluded by rows of juniper trees, and these, he believed, would serve nicely for what he was planning to do.

Like Georgann Hawkins, however, Julie Cunningham regained consciousness during the drive to where she would be killed. "She was unconscious for a short time and then (when) she came to, she was asking where she was, what was this all about."" Her frightened pleas for him to spare her life only added to Bundy's sexual excitement and probably brought a smile to his face.

Ted Bundy would kill Julie Cunningham shortly after arriving at this location. Her death, however, would come only after Bundy had sufficiently toyed with her. Having attacked her in the car, Bundy choked her until she passed out. He then had sex with her and deliberately left the passenger door open and waited for her to wake up. When she came to, she perceived the open door as a possible avenue of freedom (just as Bundy hoped she would) and immediately jumped out of the car and started running for the road. But there was no one around this isolated area for miles, and after letting her run and scream for a short distance, the very athletic law student chased her down and strangled her to death. Pulling the body under a Juniper tree, he left the completely nude remains, gathered up her clothing and personal items and left the area. Having placed everything in a large trash bag, he tossed it into a dumpster somewhere down the road.

Bundy admitted driving back to this spot all the way from Salt Lake City on two separate occasions. On his second trip, he buried the body (or what was left of it), he said. Once again, the very mobile lifestyle of this very unusual murderer was showing no signs of slowing down. He would return to Utah and the social life he'd created there, he'd attend the lectures of his law professors, and he would call Liz. Once the tethered genie of murder had been reeled back within him for a time, he would, with the apparent ease of someone without a care in the world, take his place among the ranks of the living. His intense love and the fellowship he sought with dying and dead women would, unhappily, have to take the back burner of his life, at least for a while. In his quiet and isolated moments, he would relive his latest conquests, and for a time, these memories stimulated him and brought him comfort, until he could seek out new women to posses.