The Stranger Beside Me (20 page)

Seattle Police had a file, File 1004, a file on occult happenings. Reports came into the beleaguered Task Force-reports from people who thought they'd seen "Ted" at cult gatherings. In any case with such widespread publicity, a number of "kooks" will surface, advancing theories that make an ordinary man's hair stand up on the back of his neck. There were totally unsubstantiated rumors that the missing and murdered girls had been sacrificed and their headless bodies dumped, weighted, into the almost bottomless waters of Lake Washington. A psychic from eastern Washington contacted Captain Herb Swindler and prevailed upon him to meet with her at dawn on the Taylor Mountain site where the woman pierced the ground with a stick and attempted to deduce information

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from the way it cast shadows. It was an eerie scene, and it produced no new theories.

Swindler was soon besieged by messages from those who claimed direct contact with "that other world," and almost as many requests from other departments with crimes they felt might have resulted from devil worship. The man was a nononsense cop, and he was hassled by his detectives who thought the psychic angle was ridiculous.

But Swindler kept remembering the astrological prediction that had come true on July 14th. Asked if he felt the occult was involved, he shook his head, "I don't know; I've never known." Psychiatrists were more inclined to believe that the killer was a man obsessed by a terrible compulsion, a compulsion that forced him to hunt down and kill the same type of woman, over, and over, and over again, that he could never be able to murder her enough times to find surcease. Over at County Police headquarters, Captain Nick Mackie admitted that the crimes might never be solved. The probers knew now that Lynda, Susan, Kathy, Brenda, Denise and Janice were dead. As to the fate of Donna and Georgeann, they were in the dark. There were still the extra femur bones found with Denise and Janice; they probably belonged to the missing women. It was all they were ever to know. Donna Manson and Georgeann Hawkins may never be found. In Utah, it is the same with Debby Kent. Gone.

"The name of the game is tenacity," Mackie remarked. "We have looked at 2,247 Ted' lookalikes, 916 vehicles . . ." Mackie said that there were 200 suspects left after the winnowing out, but 200 is still an impossibly large number of men to learn everything about. "We have no crime scene evidence, no positive means of death," Mackie said. "It's the worst case I've ever been on. There's just nothing."

Mackie added that a psychological profile of the killer indicated that he would probably have criminal behavior in his background, w^ probably a sexual psychopath. "You go up to a certain point in your investigation," the weary detective chief commente». "Then you stop, and start all over again."

Ted Bundy's name remained on the roster of 200 suspects. But Ted Bundy had no criminal background; he was squarely on the other side of the law from all the information the Task Force had uncovered on him. His juvenile records were shredded, and they didn't know of his long-ago arrests

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for car theft and burglary. Meg hadn't told them that she knew Ted had stolen television sets, even while he was an honor student at the University. There was a great deal she hadn't yet told them. Just as the crimes had stopped in Washington, they stopped in Utah. The murder of Caryn Campbell in Aspen was another state away, and appeared to be an isolated instance. Detective Mike Fisher in Aspen was busy checking out local suspects, eliminating every man who had known the pretty nurse. He could see no link with the Utah cases, and Washington State was a long, long way away.

Crime news was about to escalate in Colorado.

Vail, Colorado is one hundred miles away from Aspen, a booming ski resort town, but without the flash, money, the drugs, and the "laissez faire" attitude of Aspen. Jerry Ford keeps a vacation condo in Vail, and Gary Grant occasionally flies in quietly with his daughter, Jennifer, to ski.

Jim Stovall, Chief of Detectives of the Salem, Oregon Police Department, takes his winter vacation there, working as a ski instructor. His daughter lives there, also a ski instructor.

Stovall drew a deep breath as he recalled to me that twenty-six-year-old Julie Cunningham was a good friend of his daughter, and Stovall, who has solved so many Oregon homicides, was at a loss to know what had happened to Julie on the night of March 15th.

At twenty-six, Julie Cunningham should have had the world by the tail. She was very attractive and she had silky dark hair, parted in the middle. She shared a pleasant apartment in Vail with a girlfriend, and worked as a clerk in a sporting goods store, and as a part-time ski instructor. But Julie wasn't happy; she was searching for the one man she could really love and trust, someone to settle down with. She'd done the ski-bum bit, but she was growing out of that; she wanted marriage and children.

Julie was not the best judge of men. She believed their lines, and she was becoming disillusioned. She'd heard, "It's been great; I'll give you a call some day" much too often. Maybe Vail was the wrong place for her to be; maybe the aura of a ski town didn't lend itself to permanent relationships.

In early March of 1975, Julie was to suffer her last heartbreak. She thought she had met the man she wanted, and she

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was thrilled when he invited her to go to Sun Valley with him for a vacation. But she'd been "dumped on" again when they reached the resort made famous by Sonja Henie movies in the thirties. The man had never had any intention of a cornmitted relationship, and she returned to Vail, crying and depressed.

On the Saturday night of March 15th, Julie didn't have a date. She called her mother that evening, feeling a little better when she hung up just before nine. She decided to get out of her apartment, and, wearing blue jeans, a brown suede jacket, boots, and a ski cap, headed for a tavern a few blocks away. Her roommate was there; she could have a beer or two. There was always tomorrow.

Only there wasn't. There were no more tomorrows for Julie Cunningham. She didn't arrive at the tavern, and, when her roommate came home in the early morning hours, Julie wasn't there. Julie's clothes, books, records, make-up-everything but what she'd worn when she walked out-were there, but their owner never returned.

Julie Cunningham's disappearance was soon eclipsed in the news by an event in Aspen. Claudine Longet, the divorced wife of singer Andy Williams, was arrested for the March

19th slaying of her lover, "Spider" Sabich, a former world champion skier. The lovers' quarrel, the notoriety of the principals, made much bigger headlines than the disappearance of an unknown ski instructor. But the pattern was repeating, just as it had in Washington a year earlier. A victim in January. No victim in February. A victim in March. Would there be a victim in April in Colorado?

Denise Oliverson was twenty-five years old that spring, married, and living in Grand Junction, Colorado, a town just east of the Utah-Colorado border on Highway 70. Denise argued with her husband on Sunday afternoon, April 6th, and left their home, riding her yellow bike, headed for her parents' home.*-She may have grown less angry with each mile that passel; it was a wonderful spring day, and perhaps she realized that their fight had been silly. Maybe she planned to go home and make up that night. It was a warm day, and Denise wore jeans, and a print, green long-sleeved blouse; if anyone saw the pretty, darkhaired woman peddling her ten-speed that afternoon, they have never come forward to report it. 134

Denise didn't arrive at her folks' place, but they hadn't been expecting her. She didn't come home that night either, and her husband figured she was still angry with him. He would give her time to cool off, and then call.

On Monday, he called her parents and was startled to learn she had never arrived at their home. A search of the route she had probably taken was instituted and police discovered her bike-and her sandals-beneath a viaduct near a railroad bridge close by the Colorado River on U.S. 50. The bike was in good working order; there would have been no reason to leave it there.

Like Julie Cunningham, Denise Oliverson had disappeared. There would be other girls who would vanish in Colorado during that bright spring of 1975.

Eighteen-year-old Melanie Cooley, who looked enough like Bountiful Utah's Debby Kent to have been a twin, walked away from her high school in Nederland, a tiny mountain hamlet fifty miles west of Denver on April 15th. Eight days later, county road workers found her battered body on the Coal Creek Canyon road twenty miles away. She had been bludgeoned on the back of the head-probably with a rockand her hands were tied. A filthy pillowcase, perhaps used as a garotte, perhaps as a blindfold, was still twisted around her neck.

On July 1st, Shelley K. Robertson, twenty-four, failed to show up for work in Golden, Colorado. Her family checked around and discovered she had been seen alive on Monday, June 30th, by friends. A police officer had seen her in a service station in Golden on July 1st, in the company of a wildhaired man driving an old pickup truck. No one saw her after that.

Shelley had been a hitchhiker, and her family tried to believe that she had decided to take off on a whim for a visit to another state. But, as the summer passed with no word from her at all, that seemed unlikely.

On August 21, Shelley's nude body was discovered 500 feet inside a mine at the foot of Berthoud Pass by two mining students. Decomposition was far advanced, making cause of death impossible to determine. Almost 100 miles from Denver, the mine is quite close to Vail. The mine was searched on the possibility that Julie Cunningham's body might be hidden inside, but she was not found.

And then it was over. There were no more victims, or, if

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there were, they were young women whose vanishing was not reported to police. In each jurisdiction, the detectives had checked out relatives, friends, known sex criminals, and eliminated them all, through polygraph examinations or alibis.

Of all the Western victims, there was not one who had short hair, not one who could be described as anything but beautiful. And not one who would have gone away willingly with a complete stranger; even the girls who had been known to hitchhike had been cautious. Yet there is a common denominator in almost every instance. Something in the victims' lives had gone awry on the days they vanished, something that would tend to make them distracted, and therefore easy prey for a clever killer. Brenda Baker and Kathy Devine were both running away from home; Lynda Ann Healy had been ill; Donna Manson was suffering from depression; Susan Rancourt was alone on campus at night for the very first time, ever; Roberta Kathleen Parks was depressed and upset over her father's illness; Georgeann Hawkins was extremely worried about passing her Spanish final; Janice Ott was lonely for her husband and depressed on that Sunday in July; Denise Naslund had had a fight with her boyfriend. Of the Washington women, only Brenda Ball had been her usual good-natured self the last time her friends saw her, yet patrons at the Flame Tavern recall that she was worried because she'd been unable to find a ride home that night.

In Utah, Carol DaRonch was a naive, too-trusting girl; Laura Aime was a little drunk, disappointed at the fizzle of her party plans for Halloween; Debby Kent was worried about her father's recent heart attack and anxious to protect him from worry; Melissa Smith was concerned about her friend's "broken heart" and probably was thinking about their conversation as she left the pizza parlor.

The Colorado victims too had other things on their minds. Caryn Campbel^had had an argument with her fiancé over their prolonged engagement, and she was ill. Julie Cunningham was depressed over a failed romance; Denise Oliverson had had a fight with her husband; and Shelley K. Robertson had argued with her boyfriend the weekend before she vanished. The thoughts of Melanie Cooley are not known. The most basic bit of advice given to women who have to walk alone at night is, "Look alert. Be aware of your surroundings and walk briskly. You will be safer if you know

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where you are going, and if anyone who observes you senses that." Had the man who approached these young women divined somehow that he had come upon his victims at a time when they were particularly vulnerable, when they were not thinking as clearly as they usually did?

It would almost seem so. The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.

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In May of 1975, Ted Bundy had invited some old friends from the Washington State Department of Emergency Services to visit him at his apartment on First Avenue in Salt Lake City. Carole Ann Boone Anderson, Alice Thissen, and Joe McLean spent almost a week with him. Ted seemed to be in excellent spirits and enjoyed driving his friends around the Salt Lake City area. He took them swimming and horseback riding. He and Callie took them one night to a homosexual nightclub. Alice Thissen was somewhat surprised that, although Ted said he had been there before, he seemed ill at ease in the gay club.

The trio from Washington found Ted's apartment very pleasant; he'd cut pictures out of magazines and tried to duplicate the decor he favored. He still had the bicycle tire, hung from the meat hook in his kitchen, and he used that to store knives and other kitchen utensils in a mobile effect. He had a color television set, a good stereo, and he played Mozart for them to accompany the gourmet meals he prepared. During the first week in June, 1975, Ted came back to Seattle to put a garden in for the Rogers at his old rooming house, and he spent most of his time with Meg. She still made no mention of the fact that she'd talked with both the King County Police and the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office about him. The cases of the missing women in Washington were no longer being played up in local papers.

Because neither King County nor the Seattle Police Department could