The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History (28 page)

It is unknown what his itinerary might have been for that May 5, but it is safe to assume it wasn't casual sightseeing, and that he hunted women for the remainder of that day and evening in and around the university proper. At one point in his confession, he admits entering a high-rise women's dormitory where he encountered a male authority figure that immediately stopped him and demanded to see some identification. Unable to produce any, Bundy was asked to leave, and did so. In all of Bundy's travels, that was probably the closest he came to being confronted and possibly detained in the entire time he was actively involved in murder.

Ted Bundy only admitted to two murders in Idaho (the first being the hitchhiker on September 2, 1974, when he was moving to Utah). At some point during the evening, he returned to his room at the Holiday Inn, dejected and without a victim. The weather may have played a part in Bundy's failure. Although it was officially springtime, it was still quite wintry in Pocatello for that time of year. Not only was it colder than normal for both April and May, but winter was refusing to relinquish its grip, filling the city with snow showers on both days he was there. This being the case, it was unlikely even the suave Theodore Bundy could have convinced many women to stop and speak with him, much less follow him, whether he pretended to be disabled or not. Neither would there have been a large number of women out walking at night, for it was simply too cold, and anyone he encountered or approached would have been hurrying on to her destination. Add to this his lack of in-depth knowledge of the surroundings, and you have the perfect explanation for his failure to murder that evening. During his confession with Reneau, he alluded to additional attempts to abduct women, but nothing that would have been reported by those he was trying to lure away, which means these attempts floundered in the early stages and wouldn't have been considered threats by the women he spoke to.

And so, still in a predatory state of mind, he returned to the Holiday Inn, and as he shut the door to his room behind him, he was left to his own devices to deal with the intense sexual release the killer within him sought. He did not have a beautiful young woman to kill, to hold tightly as her body temperature cooled and all her cells came to a standstill. All he had were his memories; memories of the bashed and severed heads he had taken with him to his university district apartment. Or memories of his nocturnal revisiting of the dead, for more sexual gratification with those he had killed. For tonight, however, the memories of such acts would have to do. But all of that would change by noon the following day.

It is impossible to ascertain with any degree of accuracy what was going through his psychopathic brain when he awoke the next day; nor can we determine whether he stumbled on a victim at a junior high school by chance, or through a change in tactics based on his inability to snag a college girl the day before. What is known is that Bundy left his hotel room, got into his car, and began trolling. And in what was a straight shot from the Holiday Inn, first onto Pocatello Creek Road which then runs into East Alameda, which becomes West Alameda (a distance of less than two miles from the hotel), he came across a lunchtime crowd of kids at Alameda Junior High School, some of whom were leaving school for a small park located just across the street. The school itself sits at the corner of McKinley and West Alameda.

He spotted and got the attention of twelve-year-old Lynette Culver, who lived directly across from the school's western side at 23 Fairbanks Road. Bundy slowed his VW to a stop directly in front of the junior high. Culver, dressed in jeans, a red checkered shirt and a maroon jacket with a fur collar, came up to Bundy and spoke to him through the passenger window. At 5,2", with a weight between 105 and 110 pounds and long brown hair parted in the middle, she was exactly what he wanted. He would later feign surprise at her youth, telling investigators he believed she was older, but that's because he understood he'd be perceived in even harsher terms as a child killer. An unrelenting destroyer of women was okay, apparently, as long as he wasn't thought of as a killer of children.

After he said just the right things to the child (who must have been flattered that a grown man would show such interest in her), pretty Lynette Culver opened the door to Bundy's death car, slid into the seat beside him, shut the door, and with a smile on her face, said good-bye to all her tomorrows. Turning his VW around, he made the short drive back to the Holiday Inn. These were ice-breaking moments filled with friendly chitchat from the master of deception, which put the young girl even more at ease.

Ted Bundy learned numerous things about Lynette which later convinced detectives that his claim of abducting her was genuine and not something he'd heard about from someone else. When Reneau questioned him about his conversation with the girl, he said the following:

She made a comment that sounded like she had other friends or relatives in Seattle.... Made a comment indicating that she either lived with her grandmother or that her grandmother lived with her family. Another comment indicating that perhaps they were thinking of moving to another house. Indications that she had had some trouble with truancies at school ... and ... finally that I encountered her at a time when she was leaving the school grounds to meet someone at lunch time.'

When Reneau and staff did their investigation into Bundy's claims, they found them to be genuine, and determined that he only could have learned these details by speaking with Lynette.

Ted Bundy drowned the young girl in the bathtub. In the interview with Reneau (which included the FBI agent) William Hagmaier, as well as Bundy's lawyer), Bundy mentions the cause of death as drowning, but does not say specifically where and how that occurred. Because the Idaho investigators only had one hour to clear up two cases, the questions were quick-paced and direct, and they didn't follow up at the time. However, Reneau began to won der just how the killing occurred as they were leaving the prison, so he decided to send Randy Everitt back inside to question Bundy concerning the exact circumstances of Culver's death. A short time later, Everitt was escorted into a room where he and Bundy discussed what happened, and Bundy confirmed he drowned the young girl in the bathtub. He did not say, and Everitt did not ask, whether Lynette was taking a bath of her own volition when this happened, or whether she was strangled and placed unconscious in the tub and then held under the water. The sequence of events that day at the Holiday Inn may remain somewhat of a mystery, but the manner of the murder is not. True to form, Bundy satisfied his desires through necrophilia with the dead girl from Pocatello.

Having listened to Bundy for about fifteen minutes (Everitt tried to get additional information on the hitchhiker Bundy killed the previous September, but got nothing of substance), Everitt asked why he had done these things. Completely relaxed, Bundy looked straight into the investigator's eyes and replied, "It was the madness."5 That was all he could say.

After the murder, Bundy, who had purposely taken a room in the rear of the hotel, made sure no one was looking before quickly moving the body not more than six feet out the door to the waiting trunk of his VW, which was located at the front of the vehicle. As always, he did this without being noticed, and after gathering up the rest of his things, he pulled away from the hotel for the last time. He then drove a number of miles out of town and dumped Culver into a river "north of Pocatello."6 By nightfall, he'd be far away from the ongoing and fruitless search for the missing junior high school student.

In an ironic footnote to Bundy's Idaho foray, it was the one-year anniversary of the murder of Kathy Parks from Oregon, whom he had lured away from the campus cafeteria sometime after 11:00 P.M. As he savored his latest kill on the drive back to Salt Lake City, did he remember this? No one will ever know.

On Friday, June 6, Bundy made a surprise visit home to Seattle. Arriving in the early afternoon at Liz's place (Liz was still at work, but Tina was there, and happily greeted him), Bundy was ready to play the role of the returning lover and surrogate father. He and Tina even cooked up a surprise for Liz as she walked in the door. With Bundy hiding in Tina's room, Tina led her mom into her room under the pretense of having something to show her, and as Liz stood there, Bundy jumped out from behind her and threw his arms around her. As always, Liz Kendall, the one woman who truly loved him and put up with so much to preserve the relationship, could not help herself. Inwardly, despite all the fears she had over his possible role in the killings, she was still very glad to see him. Bundy would stay within this cocoon of acceptance until the following Thursday, when he would return to Utah. His other life awaited him there.

Always on the lookout for a pretty young woman for his outer self (at one point he dated the daughter of a Utah Supreme Court judge who would actually have to recuse himself from one of his future appeals due to the killer's relationship with his daughter), Bundy had recently met yet another one. Her name was Leslie Knutson, recently divorced and with a seven-yearold son. They met at a party in June hosted by Paul Van Dam, the Salt Lake County prosecutor, and began dating soon afterwards. According to statements she would later make, they would spend time together in the mountains, at the drive-in, and in her apartment.

He never attempted to discourage Leslie from adding her son Joshua to the mix. Indeed, Bundy, who for a time that summer lived at Knutson's Redondo Street address, took Josh and a group of his friends to the local swimming pool on more than one occasion. In essence, Bundy was acting (as he had with Tina) as a surrogate father to Knutson's son. This may have seemed quite natural to him. But as with all relationships in which Bundy was involved, this one would die. Nothing he told Leslie or Josh was true, or had any real foundation to it.

Like an actor who makes the part believable to all who see him, but who becomes his real self after he departs the theater and enters the real world, so too Bundy worked diligently to be accepted and believed while he was in character, but as soon as he was alone, the real self would emerge, at least in his imagination. He understood who he really was and was fully accepting of it. He was a cold-blooded killer, the product of years of violent fantasy now put into action, and almost every other emotion was little more than forced behavior. He was a murderer with an enormous craving. And that craving would lead him to take the life of another young girl before the month was out.

Susan Curtis, fifteen, had long, light-brown hair, parted in the middle. On the evening of June 27, 1975, she was attending a banquet in the Wilkinson Student Center on the campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. It was part of the Bountiful Orchard Youth Conference, and this was the first day for Susan. Living in Bountiful, some fifty miles north of Provo, the very athletic teenager had, along with two other females, ridden to BYU on her bicycle, on what would be a two-day excursion for the trio. Having left on June 26, the girls stayed that night "in a yard at the residence of Neva Smith of Lehi, Utah,"7 and completed the journey in plenty of time to attend the formal dinner the next day.

Dressed in a pretty yellow evening gown, the tanned young girl would leave the banquet hall momentarily to return to her room across campus to brush her teeth. She had braces and understood the importance of taking good care of them. After informing her roommate of her intentions (and without any hesitation concerning her safety), she left the crowd of young people and headed out alone into the semi-dark night. A January 27, 1989, article published in the Salt Lake Tribune described the surroundings: "A balmy early summer evening ... it would have been a quarter-mile walk along sidewalks and `across a couple of streets in the fading light."'

An easy walk, and others might be out walking as well, making it even safer. Had it not been for a killer of young women prowling about in the environment he cherished the most, the college setting, young Curtis would have had little more to worry about than catching the heel of her shoe in an unseen crack and having a nasty fall.

But at some point Bundy emerged from the approaching darkness, and probably through some pretext, caused her to follow him a short distance before he violently assaulted her with his standard weapon, a crowbar. It was all so easy for him. He had learned to capture and with little effort kill. His ability to strike a fatal blow without warning was without equal. With each abduction he was proving to the world just how omnipotent he'd become, and how fruitless it was for the law enforcement community to try to apprehend him. Life and death were in his hands, and he was always going to choose death. Theodore Robert Bundy had never been happier in all of his life.

That he was able to snatch Susan Curtis held an irony he'd be unaware of for many years. A resident of Bountiful, Curtis had attended the play at Viewmont High School on the same night as Debbie Kent. She was in the auditorium when the salivating killer was desperately searching out a victim, and may have seen or been seen by him. They were destined to meet again, and she would simply vanish. The only eyes to capture the scene were the eyes of her killer.

Bundy used his Chevron credit card to purchase gas on June 13 in Salt Lake City and did not make use of it again until July 9. There is no reason to think that he was any less active during that period. He may have had some money saved, received additional funds from back home, or may even have stolen (or simply used) another person's credit card. But it is highly unlikely he suddenly brought a halt to his spectacular success as a traveling and untraceable killer. That simply didn't happen. During this period other women were murdered in locations with which Bundy was not only familiar, but had frequented.

It was July 1 and no one in Shelley Robertson's family seemed to know where she was. She hadn't shown up for work that day in the family's Golden, Colorado, printing business, but that didn't necessarily mean anything was wrong. Even so, as the calls to friends, relatives, and a boyfriend began, it didn't take long for all involved to feel that this time her absence was different. Something, it seemed, was very wrong indeed.