Bundy- The Deliberate Stranger Read online

  To Deanie.

  And to my children, with apologies for hours and days we’ve not had together.

  And to those families whose lives were touched by these and related events; many of you whom I do not know.

  Acknowledgements

  My special appreciation goes to James B. King, executive editor, Mason Sizemore, assistant managing editor, Lane Smith, city editor, Don Hannula, other editors, and the management of The Seattle Times who provided that ultimate support so cherished by a reporter—the encouragement and freedom to pursue the story, wherever it leads.

  Scores of people provided hundreds of hours of their personal time in interviews with the author. For their assistance, their trust, their confidence, I am especially grateful. It is not possible to list all of you. Special thanks to Eleanore Rose and to James and Shirleen Aime; to Mr. and Mrs. Lyle Manson; to the law-enforcement officers, Michael J. Fisher, Jerry Thompson, Ben Forbes, Paul Forbes, Ira Beal, Brent Bullock, Robert Keppel, Stephen Bodiford, Don Patchen, Bill Gunter, G. Larry Daughtery, Al Pickles, Bill Harris, Bob Campbell, and so many others; to the prosecuting attorneys, David Yocom, Milton K. Blakey, Bob Dekle, and Larry Simpson; to the admirable attorneys who serve the defense, Lynn Thompson, J. Victor Africano, Millard Farmer, John Henry Browne, and others. And special thanks to the helpful staff of the Leon County clerk’s office, Tallahassee, Florida.

  The author is grateful for special friendships which have resulted from this work.

  Adele and Robert Monahan provided perfectly-timed support and assistance during preparation of the manuscript. Thank you.

  Dick Larsen

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: These events are true. In some rare instances a name has been changed to avoid possible embarrassment to the individual. Where conversations are portrayed, an effort was made to verify their accuracy through interviews with participants.

  Chapter One: Ted

  A heavy overcast pressed low on Puget Sound, so that the mountain ranges—the Olympics to the west, the Cascades to the east—were shrouded from view of the city by a thick, misty February veil. Up from the waterfront, a mottled gray seagull soared past upper windows of Seattle’s hillside office buildings, on a silent flight above the hum of street traffic below and the sounds of the nearby harbor.

  Abruptly, a brilliant white light bathed one seventh-floor room of the federal building, as television crews and newspaper and radio reporters readied themselves for a midmorning press conference in the office of the FBI.

  “Ah, yes,” said a TV technician, peering at his light meter, “Ted Bundy goes national.”

  Other hot lights were switched on. Reporters, opening notebooks, settled into their chairs as a silver-haired Federal Bureau of Investigation agent entered the room and took his place behind a cluster of microphones. John Reed, chief agent of the Seattle FBI office, began reading the official announcement being released across the nation at 10 A.M.[S1], local time.

  “On this date, February 10, 1978,” the agent began, “Theodore Robert Bundy has been added to the list of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s ten most wanted fugitives. … Bundy was a recent escapee from a jail in Colorado and is wanted for questioning in connection with thirty-six sexual slayings which began in California in 1969 and extended through the Pacific Northwest and into Utah and Colorado. …”

  If Theodore Robert Bundy were to be convicted of all the killings in which he is a suspect, the FBI was explaining that day, he would be “the most prolific mass murderer in American history.”

  The most prolific mass murderer in American history.

  Ted.

  While the FBI man continued to read the prepared statement, my pen paused over the notepad in my lap, and I turned my attention to the newly issued “wanted flier”—the latest poster which would be thumbtacked on public bulletin boards across America, along with all the other ‘‘most wanted” felons.

  “Interstate flight—Murder[S2],” said the headline. Beneath the ten swirl-pattern splotches, which were Ted Bundy’s fingerprints, were the three photos of Ted’s face, or, rather, three of Ted’s faces: left profile—good browline, straight-sculptured nose, loose-knit cardigan on the shoulders, the earnest, scholarly face you’d associate with a college campus; then the full face—head cocked to the left and slightly downward, tousled hair, a stubble of beard, eyebrows arched roguishly over intense eyes (I recognized that one as the way he looked after his first escape and recapture); and the lower right photograph—full face, looking toward the right, dark turtleneck, long dark hair, a full beard, a flicker of mirth in the almost smoky eyes; a photo which could be that of a leading man in a Shakespeare festival playbill.

  Below the photos, the text:

  Wanted … Age 31, born November 24, 1946 … HEIGHT: 5’11” to 6’ … WEIGHT: 145 to 175 pounds … BUILD: Slender, athletic … Caution[S3]: Bundy, a college educated physical fitness enthusiast with a prior history of escape, is being sought as a prison escapee after being convicted of kidnapping and while awaiting trial involving brutal sex slaying of woman at ski resort. He should be considered armed, dangerous and an escape risk.

  After the FBI man had completed the routine announcement, reporters asked their questions:

  “Where do you think Bundy might have gone?”

  With a shrug, Reed responded, “We’re just looking for him all over the place.” This very morning, he noted, there were news conferences like this one in Salt Lake City and Denver—cities in states where there had been many murdered and missing young women. Bundy, whose movements seemed to coincide with murders, had been major crime news in Washington, Utah, Colorado, and elsewhere in the West for months. Now, said the FBI spokesman, the “most wanted” flier on the man would go to police everywhere in the nation, to attain “maximum saturation.”

  Reed was asked: What about the thirty-six murders of which Bundy is suspected? Could the FBI detail them? Where and when—and how—did all those crimes occur?

  He could only respond to that by saying that the FBI received that information from local police jurisdictions in the Western states. The FBI knew little about Bundy, other than that he had become an interstate fugitive when, forty-three days earlier, he had slipped out of jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, leaving behind a mound of law books and other items under a blanket on his jail-cell cot, and vanished in a snowstorm.

  Local police in Colorado and elsewhere had pleaded with the FBI to put Bundy on the most-wanted list. That would assure a police alert across America, even though there would be no news-media interest in the man in such distant places as, for example, Florida.

  As the news conference ended, TV crews dismantled lights, folded tripods, packed their gear, and headed back to studios to edit film and prepare it for the evening newscasts. Newspaper and radio reporters departed for telephones and newsroom typewriters. It would be the day’s lead story: Ted Bundy on FBI’s Most-Wanted List[S4].

  Hearing, reading that day’s news would be scores of people who knew Ted Bundy in earlier years—as a friend, a college classmate, as a work associate, as that rather good-looking young man whom they had encountered somewhere, one day, by chance—people who would attempt to reconcile their own memory of him with the always darkening news reports which suggested that wherever Ted Bundy seemed to travel, young women vanished and were murdered.

  * * *

  For Mary Ellen McCaffree, a pleasant, middle-aged Seattle woman, an activist in Washington State politics and government, memories of Ted Bundy were vivid.

  Often, when she had been at home, working in her yard, tending flowers or trimming the lawn, there’d be a honk from a passing Volkswagen, and Ted would wave and shout, “Hi, Mary Ellen.”

/>   “Ted, of course, was a very friendly person. And he lived right there in the neighborhood.”

  That was in North Seattle’s University District, an attractive area of tree-lined streets, where distinguished older houses, most containing student apartments, were interspersed with fraternity and sorority houses. To the south, across 45th Street, was the woodsy edge of the large campus of the University of Washington where, in 1972, Bundy had received his bachelor’s degree in psychology. Even after graduation, he kept residence in a student apartment there in the “U District”; he seemed to enjoy the university atmosphere.

  It was the year of Bundy’s graduation that Ken and Mary Ellen McCaffree came to know the young man well. Mrs. McCaffree, onetime member of the Washington State legislature, became a key organizer in the ’72 reelection campaign of Washington’s Governor Dan Evans. Because Evans was a liberal Republican, a champion of environmental protection and other “citizen causes,” legions of intensely loyal, bright young “Evans Republicans” turned out to help in his campaign.

  Sometimes, after a session of work in campaign headquarters or of putting up yard signs, some of them would gather at the McCaffree home, to sit and talk and laugh in the comfortable living room. Often Ted Bundy was there.

  The young man in turtleneck sweater, jeans, and tennis shoes confided that his dream was to go through law school. “But money’s a real problem,” he added. He talked excitedly of his new interest in the exhilarating world of politics—perhaps a career in politics.

  “Well, Ted,” she replied, “I always tell all the kids I know—the ones that get interested in politics early—that the most important thing is to get your education first. Ted, I really think you should get your law degree.”

  He nodded in agreement.

  * * *

  Jim Moore recalls first meeting Bundy during Moore’s unsuccessful 1972 campaign for the nonpartisan office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Mandatory school busing to attain racial desegregation had erupted early that year as a major issue in the Florida presidential-primary election and had spread as a hot issue into other campaigns across America.

  That evening in October, Moore, a tall, mostly bald, bespectacled psychologist for the Seattle school system, delivered his antibusing speech to a candidate’s forum at Lincoln High School. Afterward, some of the candidates mixed with the crowd in the auditorium, and a well-dressed young man approached Moore to talk about the issue.

  “Watch it,” Moore’s campaign manager told him. “The guy’s taping you.” The young man held a partially hidden tape recorder. “It’s okay,” said Moore.

  Moore’s interviewer introduced himself as Ted Bundy, a campaign worker for Governor Dan Evans. He said he was researching issues. “He was a very sharp young chap,” Moore would reflect later. “Nice-looking young man.”

  Moore had grown up in the distant small town of Lake City, Florida, where his closest boyhood friend, H. Morris Williams, also had gone into the field of education in their hometown. On that day, February 10, 1978, when Moore saw the news that Ted Bundy was on the list of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives, Moore’s boyhood friend Williams, principal of the Lake City, Florida, junior high school, was fearful about a pretty dark-haired schoolgirl who had vanished mysteriously from his school the day before.

  The coincidence of the date would dawn on Moore and Williams later.

  In the predawn of that morning—a few hours before the FBI press conference in Seattle—Morris Williams had been roused out of his bed at his Lake City home by a distraught mother and father. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Leach were begging him to go with them to the junior high school and search for their daughter, Kimberly.

  * * *

  It was rather ironic, Cathy Swindler remembered with a chuckle, how Ted first seemed to her “sort of Kennedylike.” There was a little personal-political irony in that.

  During 1968, that year of turbulence and frustration for America, agonizing over the war in Vietnam and social upheaval at home, Cathy was an early, avid supporter of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in his campaign for the Presidency. Then came his shocking assassination in California, and Cathy was disconsolate. An acquaintance at Western Washington State College, where she was a student, persuaded Cathy to go to work for what her friend described as “the next best candidate available”: Nelson Rockefeller of New York.

  Although Rockefeller was a Republican, and Cathy was a loyal Democrat, she volunteered to work in the Draft Rockefeller headquarters in downtown Seattle. The office manager welcomed her with a cordial greeting: “Hi, I’m Ted Bundy. Welcome to the Rockefeller campaign.” He was quite handsome, and Cathy, a pretty nineteen-year-old with long honey-brown hair, was impressed by her new supervisor.

  “He was very well dressed and well mannered,” Cathy recalled. “The kind of guy a girl my age would look at and just say wow! Sort of Kennedylike.”

  Day by day, as she performed her routine work—typing, sorting file cards, handling telephone calls and other campaign chores—Cathy also watched and admired the efficient, obviously confident young man. “Ted had control of what he was doing. He was really poised. He was friendly. He was always smiling.” Ted had a way of letting volunteers know their work was appreciated. “He was terribly charismatic. Obviously, he was someone who had a great deal of compassion in dealing with other people.”

  Then came that exciting moment when Ted approached Cathy’s desk and asked, “Would you like to walk with me up to the public market for lunch?”

  “I almost fell all over myself,” she remembered. She accepted, of course, with as much composure as she could summon. That noontime, in the bright sunshine, the two of them—the suave, twenty-one-year-old man and the shining-faced younger woman—walked together, chatting happily, along the busy downtown street, northward to Seattle’s Pike Place market, a quaint arcade of farm-fresh fruit and vegetable stands, fish markets, crafts shops, and tucked-away eating places.

  “Why don’t we have bagels and cream cheese?” Ted suggested.

  “What and what?” Cathy laughed. Slightly embarrassed, she admitted she had never heard of bagels. Ted patiently explained that, while bagels and cream cheese might be unfamiliar to a native of Seattle, it was a common order, especially in the East. “Try it,” he suggested.

  Cathy and Ted took their bagels, wrapped in napkins, to a place behind the market, where they could sit and look down on Seattle’s waterfront. The warm breeze ruffled their hair, and Cathy listened, fascinated, as Ted talked about his studies at the University of Washington, his interest in the law and politics and people. Cathy felt flattered that he treated her so equally, even though she felt very little-girllike in the presence of a young man of such urbanity.

  “He was a champion of causes. He was concerned about the situation of the blacks, of all minorities. And the poor,” she remembered. “He was unhappy with the injustices of society, and he wanted to do something about them.”

  After their first lunch together, there were other dates. Sometimes they went to a movie, sometimes they just had coffee and conversation.

  Once Ted invited Cathy to his apartment in the University District to play chess. “I don’t know how to play chess,” she replied. “It’s okay, I’ll teach you,” he offered. Ted’s grin was encouraging and irresistible.

  Cathy arrived at Ted’s upstairs apartment a little early that afternoon and, because he wasn’t home, she waited at the doorway until he appeared. Ted soon came bounding up the stairs, wearing his tennis garb—white shorts, white tennis shirt, socks, and shoes. He just looks healthier’n hell, Cathy thought.

  “Hi, sorry to be late,” Ted said, tucking his tennis racket under one arm and unlocking the apartment door. “Come on in.”

  Ted’s small student bachelor apartment was tidy, with a neat arrangement of books and an orderly study desk. It was a warm summer day, and so the bed, in its folded-down position, was covered only by a white sheet. Ted opened the chessboard on the bed, and they sat down tog
ether, Ted arranging the chessmen and explaining the procedures of chess to her.

  During the game, when Cathy began to move a pawn, Ted warned her softly, “Look at it, now. Look at it. Think about it.” It was a gentle warning that the move she was about to make would put her in some trouble.

  Cathy withdrew her fingers from the pawn and looked up at him in wonderment. He merely grinned back at her. “Think about it now,” he encouraged. Ted made it clear she would have to think to contemplate each move until she understood what it might incur. Ted was an excellent chess coach.

  Eventually their relationship progressed to the stage of an occasional embrace and kiss. If Ted’s touching became too intimate, Cathy needed only to touch his hand, and the hand withdrew. “He was always just the perfect gentleman,” she remembered.

  Later that summer of ’68, Ted went off to Florida to attend the Republican National Convention, to continue his work in the Rockefeller cause. That was a losing effort. Richard Nixon in 1968 swept to an easy nomination, en route to the Presidency. But Ted that year had discovered the world of politics and campaigning.

  Years later, Cathy and her father thought back and tried to remember if, during the time she and Ted were dating, she ever introduced Ted to her dad. “I think I must have,” Cathy said. Her father, Herb Swindler, confessed, “You know, I just can’t remember for certain if I ever did meet him. But you know I’d sure like to be able to meet him and talk to him now.”

  Herb Swindler became chief of the homicide division of the Seattle Police Department in 1974, the year in which the series of murders of young women stunned the city.

  Even after all the hundreds of news reports about Ted Bundy’s possible connection with so many murders of young women across the nation, Cathy could only reflect on the Ted she had known:

  Ted Bundy was a figure that people met and loved. I mean, I thought I loved Ted Bundy. Not totally in a romantic way … but in terms of being moved by what he said and his feelings for other human beings … if you know him, you can’t help but have a great deal of affection for him as a human being.