Ted Bundy, the Stranger Beside Me

461 Pages·2014·0.89 MB·English

by  Rule Ann

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

Ann Rule

ANN RULE'S GRIPPING TRUE-LIFE STORIES OF PASSION AND MURDER . . .
D LUST KILLER. One of the most terrifying true-crime stories of our
time ... One by one the young women vanished. Pretty Linda Slawson
disappeared while selling encyclopedias door to door. College girl Jan
Whitney never completed her two-hour drive home ... Updated with
shocking new material about the monstrous murderer.
(154770-$4.95)
D POSSESSION. In a savage wilderness, a psychopathic killer sets out
to make a woman his sexual slave ... Joanne Lindstrom was a beautiful
young wife on a camping trip with her husband in the Northwest when
Duane entered their lives. Then her husband was gone and the only man
in her life was this stranger who demanded total possession.
(128966-$4.95)
D THE WANT-AD KILLER. The terrifying true tale of a master manipulator
of women. Brilliant and warped, he mocked the law in his orgy of savage
sex and slaughter from Alaska to Washington State to Minnesota.
(142039-$3.50)
D THE STRANGER BESIDE ME. Working on the biggest story of her life,
journalist Anne Rule didn't know that Ted Bundy, her friend and co-worker
at a psychological counseling hotline, was the slayer she was hunting.
Today Bundy is in prison, convicted of mass sexual abuse and murder;
here Rule tells the shocking story of this "allAmerican boy" turned
killer. (137116-$4.50) *Prices slightly higher in Canada.
Buy them at your local bookstore or use this convenient coupon for
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NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10019.
Copyright © 1980 by Anne Rule Afterword copyright © 1986 by Anne Rule.
All rights reserved. For information address
W. W. Norton and Company, Inc
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.
This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition
published by W. W. Norton and Company, Inc
The hardcover edition was published simultaneously in
Canada by George J. McLeod Limited, Toronto
,
First Signet Printing, July, 1981
14 15 16
Printed in the U. S. A.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE
For legal reasons, some of the names in this book have been changed.

This book is dedicated to my parents:
Sophie Hansen Stackhouse and
the late Chester R. Stackhouse ...
for their unfailing love and support,
and because they always believed.. . «

Acknowledgment
I have been fortunate indeed to have had the support of many individuals
and organizations in writing this book. Without their help and emotional
backing, it would have been impossible, and I would like to thank them:
The Committee of Friends and Families of Victims of Violent Crimes and
Missing Persons; the Seattle Police Department Crimes Against Persons
Unit; the King County Police Department Major Crimes Unit; former
Sheriff Don Redmond of Thurston County; Lieutenant James Stovall of
the Salem, Oregon Police Department; Gene Miller of the Miami Herald;
George Thurston of the Washington Post; Tony Polk of the Rocky Mountain
News; Rick Barry of the Tampa Tribune; Albert Govoni, editor of True
Detective; Jack Olsen; Yvonne E.W. Smith; Amelia Mills; Maureen and
Bill Woodcock; Dr. Peter J. Modde, and my children, Laura, Leslie, Andy
and Mike, who gave up months of their mother's companionship so that
I might write.

And tortures him now more, the more he sees Of pleasure not for him
ordained: then soon Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts
Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites:
"Thoughts, whither have ye led me? with what sweet
Compulsion thus transported to forget
What hither brought us? hate, not love, nor hope
Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste
Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying; other joy
To me is lost...."
Paradise Lost: Book IX (Lines 469-79)

Preface
I
This book began a half dozen years ago as an entirely different work.
It was to have been a crime reporter's chronicling of a series of
inexplicable murders of beautiful young women. By its very nature, it
was to have been detached, the result of extensive research. My life,
certainly, would be no part of it. It has evolved instead into an
intensely personal book, the story of a unique friendship that has
somehow transcended the facts that my research produced. As the years
passed, I learned that the stranger at the very vortex of an
ever-spreading police probe was not a stranger at all; he was my friend.
To write a book about an anonymous murder suspect is one thing. To write
such a book about someone you have known and cared for for ten years
is quite another. And yet, that is exactly what has happened. My contract
to write this book was signed many months before Ted Bundy became the
prime suspect in more than a dozen homicide cases. My book would not
be about a faceless name hi a newspaper, about one unknown out of the
over one million people who live in the Seattle area; it would be about
my friend, Ted Bundy.
We might never have met at all. Logically, statistically,
demographically, the chance that Ted Bundy and I should meet and become
fast friends is almost too obscure to contemplate. We have lived in
the same states at the same timenot once but many times-but the fifteen
years between our ages precluded our meeting for many years.
When we did meet in 1971, I was a plumpish mother of four, almost forty,
nearing divorce. Ted was twenty-four, a brilliant, handsome senior in
psychology at the University of Washington. Chanfce made us partners
on the crisis lines at Seattle's Crisis Clinic on the Tuesday night
late shift. Rapport, an almost instant rapport, made us friends.
I was a volunteer on the phones, and Ted earned two dollars an hour
as a work-study student. He looked forward to

XIV
PREFACE
law school, and I hoped that my fledgling career as a freelance writer
might grow into something that would provide a fulltime income for my
family. Although I had a bachelor's degree in creative writing from
the University of Washington, I had done little writing until 1968 when
I'd become the Northwest correspondent for True Detective Magazine and
her sister publications, all specializing in fact-detective stories.
My beat was major crime stories in a territory extending from Eugene,
Oregon to the Canadian border.
It proved to be a field for which I was well suited. I'd been a Seattle
policewoman in the 1950s and the combination of my interest in law
enforcement and my education in writing worked. I had minored in abnormal
psychology at the University and had gone on to obtain an associate
degree in police science to enable me to write with some expertise about
the advances in scientific criminal investigation. By 1980,1 would have
covered more than 800 cases, principally homicides, all up and down
the Northwestern coast, gaining the trust of hundreds of homicide
detectives-one of whom would give me the somewhat unsettling accolade,
"Ann, you're just like one of the boys."
I'm sure that our mutual interest in the law drew Ted and me together,
gave us some common ground for discussion--just as our interest in
abnormal psychology did. But there has always seemed to be something
more, something almost ephemeral. Ted himself referred to it once in
a letter mailed from a jail cell, one of the many cells he would occupy.
"You've called it Karma. It may be. Yet whatever supernatural force
guides our destinies, it has brought us together in some mind-expanding
situations. I must believe this invisible hand will pour more chilled
Chablis for us in less treacherous, more tranquil times to come. Love,
ted."
The letter was dated March 6, 1976, and we were never to come face to
face again outside prison walls or a tightly secured courtroom. But
a curious bond remains.
And so Ted Bundy was my friend, through all the good times and the bad
tunes. I stuck by him for-many years, hoping that none of the innuendo
was true. There are few who will understand my decision. I'm sure that
it will anger many. And, with it all, Ted Bundy's story must be told,
and it must be told in its entirety if any good can evolve from the
terrible years: 1974-1980.
I have labored for a long time with my ambivalence about

PREFACE
XV
Ted. As a professional writer, I have been handed the story of a lifetime,
a story any author prays for. Prohably there is no other writer so privy
to every facet of Ted's story. I did not seek it out, and there have
been many, many, long nights when I wished devoutly that things might
have been different -that I was writing about a complete stranger whose
hopes and dreams were no part of my own. I have wanted to go back to
1971, to erase all that has happened, to be able to think of Ted as
the open, smiling young man I knew then.
Ted knows I am writing this book. He has always known, and he has
continued to write to me, to call me. I suspect that he knows I will
try to show the whole man.
Ted has been described as the perfect son, the perfect student, the
Boy Scout grown to adulthood, a genius, as handsome as a movie idol,
a bright light in the future of the Republican Party, a sensitive
psychiatric social worker, a budding lawyer, a trusted friend, a young
man for whom the future could surely hold only success. He is all of
these things, and none of them. Ted Bundy fits no pattern at all; you
could not look at his record and say: "See, it was inevitable that he
would turn out like this." In fact, it was incomprehensible.
ANN RULE
January 29,1980

2 THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
University of Michigan campus, and he could have stayed there. There'd
been enough money left from the stash he'd hidden in jail to pay for
a twelve-dollar room at the YMCA but Michigan nights in January can
be unrelentingly icy, and he didn't have warm clothing.
He'd been to Florida before. Back in the days when he was an energetic
young worker for the Republican Party he'd received a trip to the 1968
convention in Miami as part of his reward. But, as he pored over college
catalogues in the University of Michigan Library, he wasn't thinking
of Miami.
He looked at the University of Florida in Gainesville and dismissed
it summarily. There was no water around Gainesville, and, as he would
say later, "It didn't look right on the map--superstition, I guess."
Tallahassee, on the other hand, "looked great." He had lived the better
part of his life on Washington's Puget Sound and he craved the sight
and smell of water: Tallahassee was on the Ochlockonee River which led
to the Apalachee Bay and the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico.
He knew he couldn't go home again, ever, but the Florida Indian names
reminded him a little of the cities and rivers of Washington with their
Northwestern tribal names.
Tallahassee it would be.
He had traveled comfortably up until New Year's Day. The first night
out was a little hard, but walking free was enough in itself. When he'd
stolen the "beater" off the streets in Glenwood Springs, he'd known
it might not be up to making the snow-clogged pass into Aspen, but he'd
had little choice. It had burned out thirty miles from Vail-forty miles
from Aspen-but a good Samaritan had helped him push the car off the
road, and given him a ride back to Vail.
From there, there was the bus ride to Denver, a cab to the airport,
and a plane to Chicago, even before they'd discovered he was gone. He
hadn't been on a train since he was a child and he'd enjoyed the Amtrak
journey to Ann Arbor, having his first drinks in two years in the club
car as he thought of his captors searching the snowbanks further and
further behind him.
In Ann Arbor, he'd counted his money and realized that he would have
to conserve it. He'd been straight since leaving Colorado, but he decided
one more car theft didn't matter. He left this one in the middle of
a black ghetto in Atlanta with the keys in it. Nobody could ever tie
it to Ted Bundy-

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME 3
not even the FBI (an organization that he privately considered vastly
overrated,) who had just placed him on their Ten-Most-Wanted List.
The Trailways bus had delivered him right into the center of downtown
Tallahassee. He'd had a bit of a scare as he got off the bus. He thought
he'd seen a man he'd known in prison in Utah, but the man had looked
right through him, and he realized he was slightly paranoid. Besides,
he didn't have enough money to travel any further and still afford a
room to rent.
He loved Tallahassee. It was perfect, dead, quiet-a hick town on Sunday
morning. He walked out onto Duval Street, and it was glorious. Warm.
The air smelled good and it seemed right that it was the fresh dawn
of a new day. Like a homing pigeon, he headed for the Florida State
University campus. It wasn't that hard to find. Duval cut across College
and he turned right. He could see the old and new capitol buildings
ahead, and, beyond that, the campus itself.
The parking strips were planted with dogwood trees-reminiscent of
home-but the rest of the vegetation was strange, unlike that in the
places from which he'd come. Live oak, water oak, slash pine, date palms,
and towering sweet gums. The whole city seemed to be sheltered by trees.
The sweet gum branches were stark and bare in January, making the vista
a bit like a northern winter's, but the temperature was nearing 70
already. The very strangeness of the landscape made him feel safer,
as if all the bad times were behind him, so far away that everything
in the previous four years could be forgotten, forgotten so completely
that it would be as if it had never happened at all. He was good at
that; there was a place he could go to in his mind where he truly could
forget. Not erase; forget.
As he neared the Florida State campus proper, his euphoria lessened;
perhaps he'd made a mistake. He'd expected a much bigger operation in
which to lose himself, and a proliferation of For Rent signs. There
seemed to be very few rentals, and he knew the classifieds wouldn't
help him much; he wouldn't be able to tell which addresses were near
the university.
The clothing that had been too light in Michigan and Colorado was
beginning to feel too heavy, and he went to the campus bookstore where
he found lockers to stow his sweaters and hat.

4 THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
He had $160 left, not that much money when he figured he had to rent
a room, pay a deposit, and buy food until he found a job. He found that
most of the students lived in dormitories, fraternal houses, and in
a hodge-podge of older apartment and rooming houses bordering the campus.
But he was late in arriving; the term had started, and almost everything
was already rented.
Ted Bundy had lived in nice apartments, airy rooms in the upper stories
of comfortable older homes near the University of Washington and the
University of Utah campuses, and he was less than enchanted with the
pseudo-Southern-mansion facade of "The Oak" on West College Avenue.
It drew its name from the single tree in its front yard, a tree as
disheveled as the aging house behind it. The paint was fading, and the
balcony listed a bit, but there was a For Rent sign in the window.
He smiled ingratiatingly at the landlord and quickly talked his way
into the one vacancy with only a $100 deposit. As Chris Hagen, he promised
to pay two months rent-$320within a month. The room itself was as
dispirited as the building, but it meant he was off the streets. He
had a place to live, a place where he could begin to carry out the rest
of his plans.
Ted Bundy is a man who learns from experience-his own and others'. Over
the past four years, his life had changed full circle from the world
of a bright young man on his way up, a man who might well have been
Governor of Washington in the foreseeable future, to the life of a con
and a fugitive. And he had, indeed, become con-wise, gleaning whatever
bits of information he needed from the men who shared his cell blocks.
He was smarter by far than any of them, smarter than most of his jailers,
and the drive that had once spurred him on to be a success in the straight
world had gradually redirected itself until it focused on only one thing:
escape-permanent and lasting freedom, even though he would be, perhaps,
the most hunted man in the United States.
He had seen what happened to escapees who weren't clever enough to plan.
He knew that his first priority would have to be identification papers.
Not one set, but many. He had watched the less astute escapees led back
to their prisons, and had deduced that their biggest mistake had been
that they were stopped by the law and had been unable to produce I.D.

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME 5
that would draw no hits on the "big-daddy" computers of the National
Crime Information Center in Washington D.C.
He would not make that fatal error; his first chore would be to research
student files and find records of several graduates, records without
the slightest shadows on them. Although he was thirty-one, he decided
that in his new lives, he would be about twenty-three, a graduate student.
Once he had that secure cover, he would find two other identities that
he could switch to if his antennae told him he was being observed too
closely.
He also had to find work-not the kind of job for which he was infinitely
qualified: social service, mental health counselor, political aide,
legal assistant-but a blue collar job. He would have to have a social
security number, a driver's license, and permanent address. The latter,
he had; the rest he would obtain. After the rental deposit, he had only
$60 left, and he'd been shocked already to see the inroads inflation
had made into the economy while he'd been incarcerated. He'd been sure
that the several hundred dollars he'd begun his escape with would last
him a month or two, but now it was almost gone.
He would rectify that. The program was simple. First the I.D., next
the job, and last, but most important, he would be the most law-abiding
citizen who ever walked a Florida street. He promised himself that he
would never get so much as a jaywalking ticket, nothing whatever that
would cause law enforcement officers to ever glance his way.
He was now a man without any past at all. Ted Bundy was dead.
As all of his plans had been, it was a good plan. Had he been able to
carry it out to the letter, it is doubtful that he would ever have been
apprehended. Florida lawmen had homicide suspects of their own to keep
tabs on, and crimes as far afield as Utah or Colorado held little interest
for them.
Most young4men, among strangers, in a strange land, with only $60 to
their names, jobless, and in need of $320 within the month, might be
expected to feel a stirring of panic at the unknown quality of the days
ahead.
"Chris Hagen" felt no panic. He felt only a bubbling elation and a vast
sense of relief. He had done it. He was free, and he no longer had to
run. Whatever lay ahead paled in comparison with what the morning of
January 9th had meant

« THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
to him as 1977 drew to a close. He was relaxed and happy as he fell
asleep in his narrow bed in the Oak in Tallahassee.
He had good reason to be. For Theodore Robert Bundythe man who was no
more-had been scheduled to go on trial for first degree murder in
Colorado Springs, Colorado at
9 A.M. on January 9th. Now that courtroom would be empty.
The defendant was gone.
,

The Ted Bundy who "died" and was reborn as Chris Hagen in Tallahassee
on January 8, 1978 had been a man of unusual accomplishment. While much
of his life had seemed to fit into the flat wasteland of the middle
class, there was also much that did not.
His very birth stamped him as different. The mores of America in 1946
were a world removed from the attitudes of the '70s and '80s. Today,
illegitimate births make up a substantial proportion of deliveries,
despite legalized abortions, vasectomies, and birth control pills.
There is only token stigma toward unwed mothers and most of them keep
their babies, merging smoothly into society.
It was not that way in 1946. Premarital sex surely existed-as it always
has-but women didn't talk about it if they indulged, not even to their
best friends. Girls who engaged in sex before marriage were considered
promiscuous, though men could brag about it. It wasn't fair, and it
didn't even make much sense, but that's the way it was. A liberal at
that time was someone who pontificated that "only good girls get caught."
Programmed by anxious mothers, girls never doubted the premise that
virginity was an end in itself.
Eleanor Louise Cowell was twenty-two, a "good girl," raised in a deeply
religious family in northwest Philadelphia. One can only imagine her
panic when she found she had been left pregnant by a man she refers
to today only as "a sailor." He left her, frightened and alone, to face
her strict family. They rallied around her, but they were shocked and
saddened.
Abortion was out of the question. It was illegal--carried out in murky
rooms on dark streets by old women or doctors who'd lost their licenses.
Furthermore, her religious training forbade it. Beyond that, she
already loved the baby growing within her. She couldn't bear the thought
of putting the child
7