Terrible Secrets Page 2

  Before the calls began, I contacted Ted’s mother, Louise, in Tacoma, thirty miles south of Seattle, where she worked as a secretary at the University of Puget Sound. Mrs. Bundy immediately worried that her eldest child — her “pride and joy,” as she later described him in court — might get himself shot. This was not an idle concern. I also notified Ralph Munro, a future Washington secretary of state and one of Bundy’s many important — and once admiring — friends and acquaintances in the senior state GOP hierarchy. I told Munro that Ted might try to get in touch and asked him to notify me should he hear from the fugitive.

  I reserved my sternest admonitions for Liz Kendall (a pseudonym), Bundy’s longtime girlfriend and onetime fiancée. I found her at her job at the University of Washington. “If you think things will be bad for Bundy when he’s discovered,” I warned Liz, “if I find any information that you were part of it, you’re going to jail, too.” She got both barrels. I wanted to scare her, and I think I did.

  Bundy jumped from the courthouse window on Tuesday morning, June 7, 1977. He scrambled up Aspen Mountain on foot, then planned to make his way south to Crested Butte, another ski area. If he got that far, he hoped to keep heading south through Gunnison to Durango and then find a way to head for the eastern U.S. before the search was widened beyond Aspen proper.

  Mike Fisher and the rest of the Aspen authorities at first had no idea where to look for him, only the hope that he hadn’t found a way out of town. Roadblocks went up within 10 minutes. A house-by-house search was begun, and volunteers began scouring the dozens of trails that wind up into the wilderness from Aspen’s outskirts.

  Fortunately for Fisher, Bundy had no maps, and no sense of direction, and quickly became disoriented in the mountains. Early on Monday, June 13, he sneaked back into Aspen and stole a l966 Cadillac, hoping there was a navigable route out of town without a roadblock up.

  However, he panicked at the sight of some flashing amber lights on the street, feared a roadblock, and was clumsily turning the big car around just as two Pitkin County deputies came along. Noticing the Cadillac’s uncertain progress, they suspected a drunk and decided to investigate.

  A short while later, a ravenous Ted Bundy was in the company of sheriff’s deputy Don Davis, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee and recounting his travails in the wild. He refused to meet with Mike Fisher.

  Why, Davis asked, had Ted risked his life in such a way?

  “He said,” the deputy told a reporter, “it was just too nice a day to stay inside.”

  ***

  Bundy began at once to plan his next escape.

  The authorities in Aspen hadn’t prosecuted a homicide in five years, which perhaps explains their casual inattention to security. For example, rather than keep Bundy in the courthouse’s basement jail, the Pitkin County authorities decided that on court days they’d ferry Ted back and forth from the newer and presumably more secure Garfield County jail in Glenwood Springs. The decision annoyed Ted until he discovered that a metal plate in his cell’s ceiling was not securely welded in place, a blatant oversight. Using hacksaw blades provided by a jailhouse acquaintance, he cut through the welds, revealing an opening just large enough for him to squirm through.

  Ted reconnoitered the crawl space above the cellblock on several occasions. A snitch repeatedly told the guards of Bundy’s nocturnal expeditions, but they ignored his reports. He was ready to go, again, and even had accumulated a $500 travel fund.

  Then his plans were disrupted by developments in court.

  Judge George Lohr repeatedly suppressed evidence of Bundy’s Utah kidnapping case and the several murders he was suspected of committing there, leaving prosecutor Milton Blakey — on loan to Pitkin County from El Paso County — with several pieces of circumstantial evidence with which to convict Ted in Colorado’s most liberal community, where the death penalty was anathema and many of the locals saw Bundy as a victim of the system. What was more, the witness Blakey expected would testify that that she’d seen Ted at the Wildwood Inn the night of Caryn Campbell’s disappearance instead identified an undersheriff as the man she saw.

  Ted’s chances of beating the murder charge were looking up. But instead of capitalizing on the prosecution’s weakening case, Bundy continued plotting another escape, while in court he forcefully and passionately argued a defense motion for a change of venue.

  On December 23, 1977, he received what at first he thought was an early Christmas gift from Judge Lohr, who granted the change of venue motion, set a trial date and announced the prosecution would move to El Paso County.

  Unfortunately for Ted, El Paso County — which encompasses politically and socially conservative Colorado Springs, as well as military installations and the U.S. Air Force Academy — probably was the Colorado county most likely to convict him. There were few qualms locally about the death penalty, either.

  Mike Fisher, who was in court that day, watched Ted smugly look around the room as Lohr spoke. “Theodore,” Fisher remembers, “is ‘Hey, I showed you. No, Blakey. I just won. I just beat ya.’ ”

  Meantime, according to Fisher, Ted’s lawyer, Kevin O’Reilly, said nothing and quietly rocked in his chair next to the defendant, whom he disliked. “Then this question mark comes across Theodore’s face,” Fisher recalls. “Hmm. And he just leans over to Kevin O’Reilly and he says, ‘Where’s El Paso County?’ And O’Reilly doesn’t move. He just sits there. He looks up at me a little bit and then he says, ‘That’s Colorado Springs, you dumb shit!’

  “Everybody must have heard it. Holy Toledo! Theodore jumps to his feet. ‘You’re sentencing me to death, without a trial! You can’t do this.’ Judge Lohr told him in so many words that ‘You’ve argued your point, young man.’ And off he went. He was hysterical. ‘This can’t happen!’ he’s yelling at Kevin.”

  ***

  A Fool for a client

  On Friday night, December 30, after dinner was served at the jail, Ted arranged some books and clothing beneath his blanket to suggest a sleeping form on his cot – he’d feigned illness in recent days — then crept up through the hole in the ceiling, across the dark crawl space, down into the chief jailer’s linen closet and out into the Colorado night. It was about 7:30.

  “Keppel,” Fisher called me the next day, “the sonuvabitch is gone again!”

  ***

  Bundy searched the snowy streets of Glenwood Springs for four hours that night before he found a battered old MG with the keys in it. Somehow, he steered the aged sports car about 25 miles up the road toward Interstate 70 before it expired in a snow bank. Just then a soldier pulled up and offered him a ride. They followed a snowplow eastward into Vail, where Ted learned the pass was closed to those without chains, which included the soldier. He asked around the lobby of the Holiday Inn for possible rides, received no offers, and so instead took the Trailways bus into Denver, where he made an 8:55 a.m. TWA flight to Chicago. It’d be another three hours before his escape was discovered back at the jail.

  Knowing that Ted had a 17-hour head start, I doubted it mattered that roadblocks were never established, or that police surveillance at Colorado’s public transportation terminals, including Denver’s Stapleton Airport, didn’t begin until late on Saturday. As we’d later learn, by then he’d already landed in Chicago and caught an Amtrak train for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Bundy spent $12 for a room at the YMCA that night, New Year’s Eve.

  Ted once more was a Page One story throughout the West, where newspaper editorialists scolded the Colorado authorities for allowing him to escape again, and so easily. Unlike his first run, this time I didn’t need to call anyone, except Liz. Louise Bundy telephoned me repeatedly, as did Ralph Munro and several of Ted’s other political friends, all hoping I had some word of where he’d gone, and all promising to stay in touch. I was, if anything, even sterner this time with Liz than I was before. I’m pretty sure she believed I was about to arrest her, even though I had no evidence she played any role in either escape.

 
We in Seattle and various other police departments in the region also received multiple reports of Bundy sightings. I didn’t believe any of them. Ted was too smart to risk identification and recapture in Washington, Utah, or Colorado, where his picture had been all over television and the papers, and the state and local police agencies would be on high alert for him.

  Yet being very sure where Bundy wasn’t did not also mean I knew where he was, or could even guess. As the days passed with no credible information whatsoever about him or his whereabouts, it began to seem as if America had swallowed him up. Public interest waned. In Colorado, news coverage of the Denver Broncos’ upcoming Super Bowl XII match against the Dallas Cowboys soon crowded Ted off the front page.

  Wherever he was, there was one fact I knew for certain. Ted would not slip quietly into anonymity, below the radar, for long. I knew his pathology, the demons that drove him. Sooner, not later, he would attack once more, and this time he’d explode.

  We didn’t have long to wait.

  ***

  Street view of the building’s front entrance, where Bundy exited the sorority with his oak club.

  A rear view of the Chi O house (sliding glass door not shown).

  Police sketch of the Chi Omega house’s second floor, indicating where the four victims were found.

  Crime scene photo of Chi Omega Lisa Levy’s bedroom. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

  Panty hose mask used at Chi Omega.

  The club Bundy used to assault Cheryl Thomas. It was recovered from her bedroom floor.

  ———

  “2 Coeds Slain, 3 Beaten by Night Stalker” headlined the Seattle Times story from Florida that my colleague, Kathleen McChesney, dropped on my desk Monday morning, January 16. According to the combined wire service report, while much of the country was absorbed in the previous day’s celebrations of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, or watching Dallas slam Denver 27-10 in the New Orleans Superdome, the city of Tallahassee was struggling with the fathomless horror of multiple early-hour assaults on and near the campus of Florida State University.

  First to die on Sunday morning, in Room Four of the Chi Omega sorority house, was 20-year-old Lisa Levy. Her killer bludgeoned her, nearly bit the nipple from Lisa’s right breast, left a double bite mark on her left buttock and brutally sodomized Levy with a Clairol hair-spray bottle. A wad of gum, presumably his, was found in her hair.

  His next victims were roommates Karen Chandler, 21, and Kathy Kleiner, also 21, across the hall in Room Eight. They would survive. Both suffered broken jaws, deep cuts and abrasions. He also fractured Chandler’s skull with his club, along with the orbit of her right eye and both cheekbones. Her right arm and one finger were broken, as well. Kleiner lost several teeth in the attack. Neither of the young women remembered anything of their assailant.

  His last victim at the sorority was 21-year-old Margaret Bowman, next door in Room Nine. She was found dead from what an EMT described as a “crushing blow” to her right forehead and apparent puncture wounds to the same area. The intruder had brought with him two pairs of Alive pantyhose by Haines. Judging from evidence of wear and laundering, he probably stole them from a clothesline or Laundromat. He’d cut away one leg from both pairs, looping the opposite leg through the hole to form a ligature. One of these improvised weapons was found on Margaret Bowman’s bedroom floor. The other was tightly knotted around her neck.

  Something interrupted him — perhaps a Chi O sister passing by the door on her way to the bathroom or the sound of a late arrival closing the back door — and he broke off the attack. I’m sure that otherwise he wouldn’t have stopped until he’d assaulted every coed on the second floor of the Chi Omega house.

  We know in any event that an appetite for a further sexual carnage was still on him. He sneaked out the sorority house’s front double doors into the frigid, 18-degree weather. Less than an hour later, he found dance student Cheryl Thomas sleeping in her single-story duplex apartment bedroom on Dunwoody Street, a short distance from Chi Omega, and proceeded to club her, too. Thomas’s next-door neighbors were awakened by the sound and called 911. Her attacker, interrupted once more, fled back outside just minutes ahead of the police after fracturing her skull in five places and leaving a semen deposit on her bloody bed sheets. A pair of Sears Cling-alon Panty hose, fashioned into a mask, was found in the apartment, as was his discarded oak club. Thomas survived the attack but would never dance again. Her hearing and balance were permanently impaired.

  ***

  After reading the Times article, my first thought was Ted. I immediately called Tallahassee to alert them about our fugitive killer. I spoke with J.O. Jackson, an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, who politely took down my information but obviously was too busy at the moment to pay much attention to this long-shot tip from the opposite end of America. The name Ted Bundy meant nothing to Jackson. I didn’t call him back, because I didn’t want to bother him. I knew what it was like for police detectives to be hounded by somebody to check out someone else.

  Many of us in law enforcement from Washington, Utah, and Colorado had the same suspicion that Bundy had surfaced in Florida after a little more than two weeks on the run and, as we anticipated, had gone berserk. Unless he was caught, we knew, he’d surely kill again.

  Yet now that our fears seemed confirmed, there was little any of us could do except to share with the Florida investigators what we knew of Ted’s history and his habits, and wait for events to unfold. Nearly another month would pass before the drama came to its sudden climax.

  Bundy had stolen a car in Ann Arbor. He drove it to Atlanta, where he abandoned the vehicle and caught a bus for Tallahassee, arriving in the Florida capital on Saturday, January 7, with $160 of his original $500 still left. He found a place to stay at The Oaks, a ramshackle, three-story rooming house on College Avenue — since gutted by fire — where he’d be known as Chris Hagen, the name he invented the day he rented Room Twelve on the second floor, for $80 a month, a sum he’d manage to avoid paying altogether.

  He immediately began roaming around Tallahassee and the FSU campus at night, repeating his pattern from the old days in Seattle. He also stole a bike, a radio, a TV, and a typewriter, just as he had as a student at the University of Washington. As his money ran low, he turned to shoplifting food from grocery stores. His neighbors at The Oaks, who saw little of him, found the new boarder odd in an indefinable way. “Maybe it was the look in his eyes, or whatever,” assistant manager Larry Wingfield told the police. “But he did seem basically different.”

  In fact, Ted was having evident trouble sustaining his trademark glibness and poise. He no longer was moving easily, unnoticed, among strangers, or coolly coaxing unsuspecting females to their deaths. He was losing control.

  On Saturday night, January 14, according to several Chi Omega sisters, Bundy appeared at Sherrod’s, a newly-opened disco next to the Chi O house on West Jefferson, near FSU’s main gate. He spooked the young women with his creepy stare. Mary Ann Picano told Ted’s jurors how she reluctantly agreed to a dance with the unnerving stranger, remarking to her friend, Anna Inglett, “Look at this guy I’m getting ready to dance with. He looks like an ex-con.”

  Hours later, as police sirens pierced Tallahassee’s heavy Sunday-morning stillness and the capitol’s citizens awakened to the terrifying word of a serial slaughter, Oaks resident Henry Palumbo and his pal Rusty Gage approached the rooming house on foot. At the concrete staircase they encountered Chris Hagen, standing alone. “He was in complete silence,” Palumbo would remember. “He wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there.”

  ***

  Experts on aberrant criminality report that a lust killer such as Bundy typically will “reintegrate,” or regain his version of normalcy, following events such as the January assaults and murders in Tallahassee. But the urge to kill and defile inevitably reasserts itself. In later interviews with journalists Stephen Michaud
and Hugh Aynesworth, Ted would call this behavior “inappropriate acting out,” prompted by the insistent demands of an internal “entity.”

  He began boosting cash and credit cards from women’s unattended purses in supermarkets, the FSU library and even Sherrod’s, then rang up meals, clothing — especially socks, of which Ted was inordinately fond — tennis wear and even a bathrobe. He also bought gasoline for the white van he stole from the FSU media center in advance of his last hunting expedition to eastern Florida in February. Over the ensuing four or five days he’d put 750 miles on the vehicle.

  On the wet and cold afternoon of Wednesday, February 8, Bundy spotted 14-year-old Leslie Parmenter walking alone across a Kmart parking lot in Jacksonville, about 160 miles east of Tallahassee. He jumped out of the FSU van and accosted the junior high school student, whose father was a Jacksonville police detective. She’d recall in court that he asked if she attended the school across the street, and was she headed for the Kmart? Parmenter described him as disheveled and unshaven, “real fidgety” and wearing some sort of badge on his jacket that read “Fire Department, Richard Burton.”