The Stranger Beside Me (7 page)

I saw Ted again in December of 1973-again at a Crisis Clinic Christmas party. It was held at a board member's house in the Laurelhurst section in Seattle's north end, and, this time, Ted brought Meg Anders with him, and I met her for the first time.

In one of those crystalline flashes that float to the surface of memory, I can recall standing in the host's kitchen, talking to Ted and Meg. Someone had placed a giant bowl of fried chicken wings on the counter, and Ted munched on them as we talked.

Ted had never described Meg to me. I had heard his detailed recollection of Stephanie Brooks's beauty, and I had seen his reaction to the tall, dark-haired woman at last year's party. Meg was nothing like either of them. She seemed very small, very vulnerable, and her long light brown hair overpowered her facial features. Cîearly, she adored Ted, and she clung to him, too shy to mingle.

I commented that Ted and I had attended the last Crisis Clinic Christmas party together, and her face lit up.

"Really"! It was you?"

I nodded. "I didn't have a date, and Ted didn't have a car, so we decided to pool our resources."

Meg seemed vastly relieved. I was clearly no threat to her, a nice, middle-aged lady with a bunch of kids. I wondered then why he had let her agonize over it for a whole year when he could easily have explained our friendship to her.

I spent most of that evening talking with Meg because she seemed so intimidated by the mass of strangers milling around us. She was very intelligent and very nice. But her focus of attention was Ted. When he wandered off into the crowd, her eyes followed him; she was trying very hard to be casual, but for her there was no one else there at all. I could understand her feelings only too well. Three months before, I had fallen in love with a man who wasn't free, would never be free, and I could empathize with Meg's insecurity. Still, Ted had been with her for four years, and he seemed devoted to her and to Liane. There seemed a good possibility that they might marry one day. Seeing Meg and Ted together, I assumed that he had given up his fantasy about Stephanie. I could not have been more wrong. Neither Meg nor I knew that Ted had just spent several days with Stephanie Brooks, that he was, in fact, en-

gaged to Stephanie, and that he was looking forward to seeing her again within a week.

Ted's life was so carefully compartmentalized that he was able to be one person with one woman, and an entirely different man with another. He moved in many circles, and most of his friends and associates knew nothing of the other areas in his life.

When I said goodbye to Ted and Meg in December, 1973, I truly didn't expect to see him again; our bond had been through the Crisis Clinic and we were both moving away from that group. I had no way of knowing that Ted Bundy would one day change my life profoundly. It would be almost two years before I heard from Ted again, and, when I did, it would be under circumstances that would shock me more than anything ever has-or possibly ever will again.

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Most of us have harbored a fantasy wherein we return to confront a lost first love, and, in that reunion, we have become better looking, thinner, richer, utterly desirable-so desirable that our lost love realizes instantly that he has made a terrible mistake. It seldom occurs in real life, but it is a fantasy that helps to relieve the pain of rejection. Ted had tried once, in 1969, to reach out to Stephanie Brooks, to rekindle a seemingly extinguished flame, and it hadn't worked. But, by the late summer of 1973, Ted Bundy had begun to be somebody. He had worked, planned, groomed himself to be the kind of man that he thought Stephanie wanted. Although his relationship with Meg Anders had been a steady and, to Meg, a committed one for four years, Ted had had no one but Stephanie on his mind when he arrived in Sacramento on a business trip for the Washington Republican Party. He contacted Stephanie in San Francisco and she was amazed at the changes four years had wrought in him. Where he had been a boy, uncertain and wavering, with no foreseeable prospects, he was now urbane, smooth, and confident. He was nearing twenty-seven, and he seemed to have become an imposing figure in political circles in Washington State.

When they went out to dinner, she marveled at his new maturity, the deft manner with which he dealt with the waiter. It was a memorable evening and when it was over, Stephanie agreed readily to make a trip soon to Seattle to visit him, to talk about what the future might hold for them. He did not mention Meg; he seemed as free to make a cornmitment as Stephanie was.

Stephanie had flown to Seattle during her vacation in September, and Ted met her at the airport, driving Ross Davis's car, and whisked her to the University Towers Hotel. He took her to dinner at the Davis's home. The Davises seemed

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to approve heartily of her, and she didn't demur when Ted introduced her as his fiancee.

Ted had arranged for a weekend in a condominium at Alpental on Snoqualmie Pass, and, still using Davis's car, he drove them up to the Cascade Pass, up through the same mountain foothills they'd traversed when they'd gone on skiing trips in their college days. Looking at the luxurious accommodations, she wondered how he had paid for it, but he explained that the condo belonged to a friend of a friend. It was an idyllic time. Ted was talking marriage seriously, and Stephanie was listening. She had fallen in love with him, a love that was much stronger than the feeling she'd had for him in their college romance. She was confident that they would be married within the year. She would work to pay his way through law school.

Back at the Davises' home, Stephanie and Ted posed for a picture together, smiling, their arms around each other. And then Mrs. Davis drove her to the airport for the flight to San Francisco as Ted had an important political meeting to attend.

Stephanie flew back to Seattle in December, 1973, and spent a few days with Ted in the apartment of a lawyer friend of his who was in Hawaii. Then she went further north to Vancouver, B.C. to spend Christmas with friends. She was very happy. They would be together again for several days after Christmas and she was sure they could firm up their wedding plans then.

Ted, then, even as he introduced me to Meg at that Christmas party in 1973 had apparently been marking tune until Stephanie returned. During those last days of 1973, Ted wined and dined Stephanie royally. He took her to Tai Tung's, the Chinese restaurant in the international district where they had eaten during their first courtship. He also took her to Ruby Chow's, a posh oriental restaurant, run by a Seattle city councilwoman, tellingier that Ruby was a good friend of his. But somethiig had changed. Ted was evasive about marriage plans. Hé

told her that he'd become involved with another woman-a woman who had had an abortion because of him. "That's over. But she calls every so often, and I just don't think it's going to work out for us." Stephanie was stunned. Ted told her he was trying to "get loose" of this other girl-a girl whose name he never men-44

tioned-but that things were just too complicated. Where he had been so loving and affectionate, he now seemed cold and distant. They had such a little time to spend together, and yet he left her alone for an entire day while he worked on a "project" at school that she felt sure could have waited. He didn't buy her anything at all for Christmas, although he showed her an expensive chess set that he'd bought for his lawyer friend. She had brought him an expensive Indian print and a bow tie, but he showed little enthusiasm for her gifts. His lovemaking, which had been ardent, had become perfunctory, what she termed a "Mr. Cool" performance, rather than a spontaneous show of passion. In fact, she felt he was no longer attracted to her at all. Stephanie wanted to talk about it, to talk about their plans, but Ted's conversation was a bitter diatribe about his family. He talked about his illegitimacy, stressing over and over that Johnnie Bundy wasn't his father, wasn't very bright, and didn't make much money. He seemed angry at his mother because she had never talked to him about his real father. He was scornful of what he called the "lack of I.Q." of the whole Bundy clan. The only member of the extended family that he seemed to care about was his grandfather Cowell, but the old man was dead, leaving Ted with no one.

Something had happened to change Ted's whole attitude toward her, and Stephanie was a very confused and upset woman when she flew back to California on January 2, 1974. Ted had not even made love to her on their last night together. He had chased after her for six years. Now, he seemed uninterested, almost hostile. She had thought they were engaged, and yet he had acted as if he could hardly wait to be rid of her.

Back in California she waited for a call or a letter from him, something that might explain his radical change of heart. But there was nothing. Finally, she went to a counselor to try to sort out her own feelings.

"I don't think he loves me. It seems as though he just stopped loving me."

The counselor suggested that she write to Ted, and she did, saying that she had questions that had to be answered. Ted didn't answer that letter. In mid-February, Stephanie called Ted. She was angry and hurt, and she started to yell at him for dropping her without

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so much as an explanation. His voice was flat, calm, as he said,

"Stephanie, I have no idea what you mean ..." Stephanie heard the phone click and the line went dead. At length, she concluded that Ted's high-power courtship in the latter part of 1973

had been deliberately planned, that he had waited all those years to be in a position where he could make her fall in love with him, just so that he could drop her, reject her, as she had rejected him. In September, 1974, she wrote to a friend, "I don't know what happened. He changed so completely. I escaped by the skin of my teeth. When I think of his cold and calculating manner, I shudder." She was never to have an explanation. She never heard from him again and she married someone else at Christmas,

1974.

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During December 1973 I had participated in a different kind of writing project. I carried many deputy sheriff commissions in my wallet; they had been given to me by various counties around Washington State as a P.R. gesture, and made me more of a "Kentucky Colonel" than a bonafide law officer. I'll admit I got a kick out of having the badges, but I didn't do any real law enforcement work. Then on Thursday, December 13th, I had been asked to help with an investigation in Thurston County sixty miles south of Seattle.

Sheriff Don Redmond called and asked if I would attend a briefing on a homicide case his county was investigating. "What we want to do, Ann," he explained, "is fill you in on where we are with the Devine case, get your impressions. Then we need a comprehensive narrative of everything we've got so far. It may be rushing you, but we'd like about thirty pages covering the case that we can hand to the prosecuting attorney on Monday morning. Could you do that?" I drove to Olympia the next day and met with Sheriff Redmond, Chief Criminal Deputy Dwight Caron, and Detective Sergeant Paul Barclift. We spent the day going over follow-up reports, looking at slides, and reading the medical examiner's autopsy reports in the case involving the murder of fifteen-year-old Katherine Merry Devine. Kathy Devine had vanished from a street corner in Seattle's north end on November 25th. The pretty teenager-who had looked closer to eighteen than fifteen-had last been seen alive hitchhiking. She had told friends that she was running away to Oregon. They had seen her, in fact, get into a pickup truck with a male driver. She had waved goodbye, and then she had disappeared. She never arrived at her Oregon destination. On December 6th, a couple, hired to clean up litter in McKenny Park near Olympia, had found Kathy's body. She

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lay on her face in the sodden forest. She was fully clothed, but her jeans had been slit in the back seam with a sharp instrument from her waist to the crotch. Decomposition was far advanced, due to an unusually warm winter, and ravaging animals had carried away her heart, lungs, and liver.

The pathologist's tentative conclusion was that she had been strangled, perhaps had her throat cut; the primary wounds had been to the neck. The condition of her clothing suggested also that she had been sodomized. She had been dead since shortly after she was last seen. Sheriff Redmond and his investigators were left with the girl's body, the mock suede coat with fur trim, the blue jeans, a white peasant blouse, waffle stomper boots, and some cheap costume jewelry. The time lapse between her disappearance and the discovery of her body made it next to impossible to get a handle on the man who had killed her.

"It's that damned new hitchhiking law," Redmond said. "Kids can stick their thumbs out and get in a car with anybody." There was so little to go on, but I took copious notes and spent the weekend putting the Devine case in chronological order, listing what was known and concluding that Kathy Devine had probably been killed by the man who gave her the ride. It seemed an isolated case; I had not written up any similar homicides in several years. I spent that whole weekend-with the exception of Saturday night when I attended the Crisis Clinic party-working on my thirty-page report for Redmond. On Sunday evening, two deputies were sent up from Olympia to pick it up. As a special deputy on assignment. I was paid $100 from the department's investigative funds. I didn't forget the Devine case; a few months later, I wrote it up as an unsolved case for True Detective, asking that anyone with information contact the Thurston County Sheriff's Office. But no one did, and the case remained unsolved. With the new year, 1974, I was aware that, if I was going to support four children, I would have to step up my writing sales. Although their father's cancer had seemingly been arrested, I remembered the first surgeon's prognosis that Bill's life expectancy could range anywhere from six months to five years.