The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule.

[midnight_birth]

Title: The Stranger Beside Me.
Author: Ann Rule.
Genre: Non-fiction, true crime, rape, abuse, legal, autobiography, serial killer, letters, journalism, mental illness.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1980 (Afterword - 1996, The Last Chapter - 1989, 'Final Chapter' - 2008).
Summary: Utterly unique in its astonishing intimacy, the book defies the expectation that we would surely know if a monster lived among us, worked alongside us, appeared as one of us. Rule describes her dawning awareness that Ted Bundy, her sensitive coworker on a crisis hotline, was one of the most prolific serial killers in America. He would confess to killing at least thirty-six young women from coast to coast, and was eventually executed for three of those cases. Drawing from their correspondence that endured until shortly before Bundy's death, and striking a seamless balance between her deeply personal perspective and her role as a crime reporter on the hunt for a savage killer-the brilliant and charismatic Bundy, the man she thought she knew-Rule changed the course of true-crime literature.

My rating: 7/10.
My review:


♥ 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.

~~from Preface (1980).

♥ We talked about how it could have happened-with all those girls, thirty-nine of them, and a housemother. How could anyone have done so much damage-so quietly-in such a short time?

"He had already scouted it out-that afternoon-I think," she mused. "For some reason, we were all gone Saturday afternoon, even the housemother. The house was empty for a couple of hours. When we came home, the housemother's cat was acting spooked, and its hair was standing on end. It ran through our legs and out the door-and it didn't come back for two weeks."

She said some of the girls had felt the presence of a kind of evil that night. The Chi O's had wondered only a little while about the cat's behavior, but, later that night, at least two of the girls who were upstairs in the sleeping area had experienced stark terror, a free-floating dread with nothing to pin it to.

...The Chi Omegas-besieged by the press, ousted from their rooms by investigators dusting for prints, gathering evidence, and testing for blood-were evacuated from the huge house on West Jefferson and farmed out around Tallahassee with alumnae. They came back two weeks later, just about the same time the housemother's cat deemed the house safe again.

♥ He was alone in a cell most of the time, a cell once occupied by John Spenkelink-the convict who had been executed six days before Ted chose to tear up his "admission of guilt" on May 31, 1979, throwing away what proved to be his last good chance to elude the death penalty. He would have been locked up forever-but he would have lived.

If it was a gamble, Ted had lost.

Less than a year later, Ted sat in the dead Spenkelink's cell, a short walk from "Old Sparky"-the electric chair that would soon hold the record of electrocuting more convicted killers than any other since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on the death penalty in 1976.

♥ The Stranger Beside Me was published in August of 1980. I had not written to Ted; he had not contacted me-not since his ebullient phone call just before his Miami trial. As I wrote this book, I had been startled to find a great deal of anger surfacing from someplace inside me where I had unknowingly repressed it for years. I thought that I had juggled my ambivalence about Ted very well. But listing the murders, detailing the crimes, and being closeted for months in my office where the walls were papered with the photographs of young women who had died grotesquely changed me.

♥ During the summer of 1982, Carole Ann Boone wore a jacket when she went to the prison to visit her husband, despite the baking heat of northern Florida's July and August. Tall and large-boned, it was easier for her to hide a growing secret than it would be for a more petite woman.

She was putting on weight. That in itself was't unusual. Women whose men are locked behind bars, who subsist on low incomes, frustration, and meager hope, often eat too much. But Carole Ann's weight was all around the middle, and to their chagrin, prison authorities saw that her silhouette was unmistakable.

Carole Ann Boone was pregnant, carrying Ted Bundy's child.

The two of them, together against the world, had managed to marry by subterfuge. Now, they had accomplished the conception of a child the same way.

♥ It seems ironic that Ted Bundy is in such superb physical condition. He has become a vegetarian. Because Florida State Prison dietitians do not cater to individual requests, it was necessary for him to change his religious affiliation once again. Born and raised a Methodist, converted to Mormonism just before his first arrest, he is now an avowed Hindu. He admits that it is a pragmatic conversion; as a Hindu, he has the legal right to be served a vegetarian and fish diet.

His muscles are defined, his lung capacity is excellent, and his vegetarian diet prevents atheromatous deposits from clogging his arteries. When he dies, Ted Bundy will be in perfect health.

~from Afterword (1986).

♥ Just four of the hundreds of prisoners on Florida's death row had survived three death warrants. Sixteen men had been executed since 1979. There was no other prisoner who evoked rage and frustration in the citizens of Florida the way Bundy did. For many of them, he was no loner a human being; he was a cause.

♥ Whether Dr. Lewis had diagnosed Ted's mental disorder correctly or not, she did, however, present testimony that I found fascinating. Ted had told me about his grandfather, Sam Cowell of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This was the grandfather who Ted told me he thought was his father for much of the early part of his life. Ted and Louise, of course, lived with the elder Cowells, Sam and Eleanor, for the first four and a half years of his life.

The grandfather-father Ted described to me at the Crisis Clinic so long ago was a Santa Claus kind of grandfather. Ted clearly adored him, or so he recalled him to me. When Louise brought Ted out to Tacoma in 1951, Ted said he had been torn away from Grandfather Sam, and he missed him terribly. Indeed, Ted also told Dr. Lewis that his grandfather was "wonderful and loving and giving," and that all his memories were favorable.

The Grandfather Sam that Dr. Lewis described after interviews with family members (not including Louise Bundy) was a volatile, maniacal man. Sam Cowell, a talented, workaholic landscaper, allegedly terrorized his family with temper tantrums.

He was the sort of breadwinner whose homecomings sent his family scattering for shelter. He shouted and ranted and raved. His own bothers feared him, and reportedly muttered that somebody should kill him. His sister Virginia thought him "crazy." Sam Cowell was described as a bigot who made Archie Bunker look liberal; he hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, Jews.

And Cowell was sadistic with animals. He grabbed any cat that came near him and swung it by the tail. He kicked the family's dogs until they howled in pain.

A church deacon, Sam Cowell was said to have kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse. Some relatives said that Ted and a cousin sneaked in there to pore over the pulp magazines. Since Ted was only three or four, that may be a creative memory talking. Or it may be true.

The picture emerging from Lewis's testimony on Ted's grandmother, Eleanor, was that of a timid, obedient wife. Sporadically, she was taken to hospitals to undergo shock treatment for depression. In the end, Grandma Eleanor stayed home, consumed with agoraphobia (fear of open places), afraid to leave her own four walls lest some unknown disaster should overtake her.

There were three daughters born to this ill-matched pair. Louise was the eldest, and then Audrey, and, ten years later, Julia.

This then had been the household where Ted Bundy spent his first, vital, formative years-the years when a child grows a conscience. For fourteen years, I have wondered if there was not something more to know about Ted's childhood, something beyond his illegitimate birth, beyond his mother's deception (if, indeed, Ted was even telling me the truth about that), something traumatic back in Philadelphia. It finally spilled out in Dr. Lewis's testimony in Orlando.

When Louise Bundy discovered she was pregnant, seduced by that shadowy man whose real identity grows more blurred with every year that passes, she must have been terrified. More than most families in 1946, hers would not welcome a bastard grandchild.

Her church failed her; she was ostracized by her Sunday school group. One can only imagine her father's reaction. Her mother must have wept and crept still further into herself.

Louise wet off to Burlington-without her family-and gave birth to a husky baby boy.

And then she went home, leaving Ted behind. Ted waited in the Elizabeth Lund Home for three months while his mother agonized over what she would do. Could she take him home to Philadelphia? Should she put him up for adoption? The nurturing, cuddling-the bonding, so necessary to an infant's well-being, was put on hold.

He was only a tiny baby, but I think he knew.

It was not Louise Cowell Bundy's fault. I have always maintained that she did the best she could. With the new information coming from Dr. Lewis's testimony, it is obvious she did the best she could under horrendous circumstances. But she brought little Ted Bundy, a sensitive, brilliant little boy, into a household dependent on the whims of a tyrannical patriarch. The fact that Ted Bundy could never remember his grandfather as anything less than a kindly, wonderful man, indicated, I think, just how frightened Ted was. He must have repressed all those emotions, virtually wiping out normal responses.

He survived-but I think his conscience died back then, a casualty of Ted's flight from terror. Part of him closed off before he was five years old.

♥ The fact that Ted was damaged early on comes out in a most telling incident that Dr. Lewis related in Ted's December 1987 competency hearing. It occurred when Ted three years old. His Aunt Julia, then about fifteen, awakened from a nap to find that her body was surrounded by knives. Someone had placed them around her as she slept. She wasn't cut, but the glitter of the blades made Julia's heart convulse.

Julia recognized that the knives had come from the cutlery drawer in the kitchen, and she looked up to see her three-year-old nephew. The adorable, elfin Ted Bundy stood by her bed, grinning at her.

Three years old.

♥ Yes, he had varied his pattern; he had buried some of them, left some in woods, tossed some of his victims away in rivers.

There were so many. There were probably more victims than we will ever know. Bob Keppel thinks Ted has killed at least a hundred women, and I agree with him.

♥ How many more? Because Ted murdered so many, many women, he did more than rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their specialness too. It is too easy, and expedient, to present them as a list of names; it is impossible to tell each victim's story within the confines of one book. All those bright, pretty, beloved young women became, of necessity, "Bundy victims."

And only Ted stayed in the spotlight.

♥ I owed nothing to Ted, the monster. The rapist-killer-monster. He had lied to me, and he had destroyed more lives, horribly, than anyone I had ever written about. I was remembering a myth.

♥ The screen showed the Florida State Prison, and then it focused on the crowds who sang and drank beer and celebrated the coming execution. Three hundred people wore costumes and masks and held banners up that said "Burn Bundy!" and "It's Fry-Day!" A man in a Reagan mask kept popping in front of the cameras. He held an effigy of a rabbit in one hand, his "Bundy Bunny," he explained.

They all seemed quite mad. They had no more humanity than Ted.

♥ With Dobson seeming to lead him, Ted talked of his alleged addiction to pornography, of his warping by printed matter that involved violence and sexual violence.

Ted was very convincing, a drained, repentant man about to die-yet still warning the world.

I wish that I could believe his motives were altruistic. But all I can see in that Dobson tape is another Ted Bundy manipulation of our minds. The effect of the tape is to place, once again, the onus of his crimes, not on himself, but on us.

I don't think pornography caused Ted Bundy to kill thirty-six or one hundred or three hundred women. I think he became addicted to the power his crimes gave him. And I think he anted to leave us talking about him, debating the wisdom of his words. In that, Ted succeeded magnificently.

The blunt fact is that Ted Bundy was a liar. He lied most of his life, and I think he lied at the end.

♥ Ted Bundy's interview with James Dobson accomplished one thing that troubled me. During the weeks after Ted was executed, I heard from a number of young women. Sensitive, intelligent, kind young women wrote or called me to say that they were deeply depressed because Ted was dead. One college student had watched the Dobson tape on television and felt moved to send flowers to the funeral parlor where Ted's body had been taken. "He wouldn't have hurt me," she said. "All he needed was some kindness. I know he wouldn't have hurt me..."

A high school student said she cried all the time, and couldn't sleep because a good man like Ted Bundy had been killed.

There were so many calls, so many crying women. Many of them had corresponded with Ted and fallen in love with him, each devoutly believing that she was his only one. Several told me they suffered nervous breakdowns when he died. Even in death, Ted damages women. They have sent for the Dobson tape, paying the $29.95 fee, and watch it over and over. They see compassion and sadness in his eyes. And they feel guilty and bereft. To get well, they must realize that they were conned by the master conman. They are grieving foe a shadow man that never existed.

♥ At lost last, peace, ted.

And peace and love to all the innocents you destroyed.

~from The Last Chapter (1989).

♥ And so I deal, always, with separate Teds. As I sit in police seminars and watch slides of Ted's dead victims-the ones who were found before they were skeletal-I see the evidence that he returned to the scenes of his crimes to line dead lips ad eyes with garish makeup and to put blush on pale cheeks. I accept that this was done by the second Ted. I accept that he engaged not only in cruel murder but in necrophilia. I can deal with this intellectually, but I try never to let it slip into the emotional side of my mind. Yet even writing about it makes my throat close and the skin at the back of my neck prickle.

Ted Bundy is the one subject that I have never been able to regard in a detached manner. He is the only subject that I knew before, during, and after his crimes-and I hope there will never be another.

~from Update: Twenty Years Later (2000).

♥ In 1980, I didn't really understand the difference between being psychotic and having a personality disorder. In the first edition of this book, I wrote that Ted bad to have been insane when he killed all those young women. I really thought Ted was just plain crazy, and said he should be sent to a mental hospital.

And I was wrong. At least I understood that his personality disorder meant that he should never be released into society. But that's about all I can take credit for. I'm not embarrassed that I stumbled over my diagnosis; many psychologists and psychiatrists who interviewed Ted did, too.

He wasn't insane. He undoubtedly had a number of personality disorders-probably narcissistic, borderline, and sociopathic. One psychologist, who changed her diagnosis of Ted Bundy more than once, started out with bipolar and finally settled on Multiple Personality Disorder. I never agreed that either category was accurate. His characteristics and actions didn't fit-unless you forced them into the wrong holes.

Ted, I believe, was a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of their death, and even after. He was a child, an adolescent, a young man who never felt much power over his life. He chose a hideous path as he sought power and control.

He was all that mattered to him.

One who suffers from a personality disorder knows the difference between right and wrong-but it doesn't matter because he is special and he deserves to have and do what he wants. He is the center of the world; we are all paper-doll figures who don't matter. Under the law and medically, someone who is insane doesn't know the difference and is not responsible for his actions, however shocking.

Early on, I thought that at some point Ted would confess because he surely must have felt guilty. But he never felt guilty; he had no capacity for guilt.

Only for survival.

♥ As I write these recollections of women who survived, I hope my readers are taking careful note of why they did.

They screamed.

They fought.

They slammed doors in a stranger's face.

They ran.

They doubted glib stories.

They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them.

♥ I had always prided myself on my ability to detect aberrance in other humans-both because I had that innate skill and thought experience and training. And I have berated myself silently for a long time because I saw nothing threatening or disturbing in Ted's . He was very kind of me, solicitous of my safety, and seemingly empathetic.

The only clue I had was that my dog-who liked everyone-didn't like Ted at all. Whenever he bent over my desk at the Crisis Clinic, she growled and the hackles on her neck stood up.

The lesson is clear: Pay attention to your dog!

♥ He was so many things to different people. He was an actor, a liar, a thief, a killer, a schemer, a stalker, a charmer, intelligent but not brilliant, and doomed.

I don't think even Ted knew what he was really like.

~~from The Final Chapter? (2008).

♥ Why had he chosen Tallahassee? Chance more than anything. Looking back, we see it often casual choices which chart a path to tragedy.

♥ 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.

♥ If, as many people believe today, Ted Bundy took lives, he also saved lives. I know he did, because I was there when he did it.

I can picture him today as clearly as if it were only yesterday, see him hunched over the phone, talking steadily, reassuringly-see him look up at me, shrug, and grin. I can hear him agreeing with an elderly woman that it must have been beautiful indeed when Seattle was lit only by gas-lights, hear the infinite patience and caring in his voice, see him sigh and roll his eyes while he listened to a penitent alcoholic. He was never brusque, never hurried.

Ted's voice was a strange mixture of a slightly western drawl and the precise clipped phraseology of an English accent. I might describe it as courtly.

Shut off from the night outside-with doors locked to protect us from the occasional irrational caller who tried to break in-there was an insular feel to those two offices where we worked. The two of us were all alone in the building, connected to the outside world only by the phone lines. Beyond the walls, we could hear sirens screaming as police unit and Medic I rigs raced up Pine Street a block away toward the county hospital. With the blackness outside our windows broken only the by the lights in the far below us, the sound of rain and sleet against the panes, those sirens seemed to be the only thing reminding us that there was a world of people out there. We wee locked in a boiler room of other people's crises.

♥ The student riots and the marches blocking the I-5 freeway enraged Ted. On more than one occasion, he had tried to block the demonstrations, waving a club and telling the rioters to go home. He believed there was a better way to do it, but his own anger was, strangely, as intense as those he tried to stop.

I never saw that anger. I never saw any anger at all.

♥ He began with a discussion of violence: "You begin with the relation between might and right, and this is the assuredly proper starting point of our inquiry. But for the term 'might,' I would substitute a tougher and more telling word: 'violence.' In right and violence, we have today an obvious antimony."

He had not softened his position against riots, student insurrections, and anarchy. The law was right; the rest was violence.

♥ "One white sheet (bloodstained-type A positive), one yellow pillow (bloodstained-type A positive), one short cream-colored nightgown with brown and blue flowered trim (bloodstained-type A positive). Area of bloodstain on white sheet shows distinct 'ribbed' pattern at edges." This was all that remained of the vibrant girl who had bade goodnight to her friends on January 31 and walked away into oblivion.

♥ Ishii believes implicitly in the theories of Dr. E. Locarde, a pioneer French criminalist who states, "Every criminal leaves something of himself at the scene of a crime-something, no matter how minute-and always takes something of the scene away with him." Every good detective knows this; this is why they search so intensely at a crime scene for that small part of the perpetrator that he has left behind: a hair, a drop of blood, a thread, a button, a ginger or palm print, a footprint, traces of semen, tool marks, shell casings. And, in most instances, they find it.

♥ His last application to Utah had contained the information that he was to the married to a former Utah resident, Meg Anders, by the time he entered law school in the fall, and a notation on his application made by the registrar read, "Very anxious to attend University of Utah-will be married before quarter starts. Recommend acceptance.

..Not the least of the documents in Ted's file at the University of Utah Dean of Admissions' office was a letter from Governor Dan Evans, a letter he had written on behalf of Ted in 1973.

Dean of Admissions
College of Law
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112

Dear Dean:

I write to you in support of the application of Theodore Bundy to your law school. Ted has expressed a desire to attend the University of Utah. It is my pleasure to support him with this letter of recommendation.

I first met Ted after he had bee selected to join my campaign staff in 1972. It was the consensus among those of us who directed the operation that Ted's performance was outstanding. Given a key role in the issues, research, and strategy section, he demonstrated an ability to define and organize his own projects to effectively synthesize and clearly communicate factual information, and to tolerate uncertain and sometimes critical situations. In the end, it was probably his composure and discretion that allowed him to successfully carry out his assignments. These qualities made his contributions to strategy and policy dependable and productive.

If, however, you are concerned that a political campaign is not the measure of a prospective law student, then I am sure you will look, as I have, at Ted's other achievements and activities. Look at his academic record in his last two years of college; look at his impressive community involvements; and look at the several law-related positions he has held since graduation. I believe he is qualified to and intent upon pursuing a career in law.

I strongly recommend the admission of Ted Bundy to your law school. You would be accepting an exceptional student.

Sincerely,
Daniel J. Evans.

♥ Something in the victims' lives had gone awry on the days she 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 Campbell had had an argument with her fiancé over their prolonged engagement, and she was ill. Julie Cunningham was depressed over a failed romance; Denise Overson 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 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.

♥ There seemed to be two Ted Bundys emerging. One, the perfect son, the University of Washington student who had graduated "with distinction," the fledgling lawyer and politician, and the other, a charming schemer, a man who could manipulate women with ease, whether it be sex or money he desired, and it made no difference if the women were eighteen or sixty-five. And there was, perhaps, a third Ted Bundy, a man who turned cold and hostile toward women with very little provocation.

♥ I didn't know if I'd hear from Ted when he was in Seattle, but several detectives took me aside and said, "If he calls you, we don't want you going anywhere alone with him-not unless you tell us where you're going to be first."

"Oh, come on," I said. "I'm not afraid of Ted. Besides, you're following him everyplace anyway; if I'm with him, you'll see me."

"Just be careful," a Seattle homicide detective warned. "Maybe we'd better know where to find your dental records in case we need to identify you."

I laughed, but the words were jarring; the black humor that would surround Ted Bundy evermore had begun.

♥ Ted's stance was that of an innocent man; he was hurt by the accusations, and he'd just spent eight weeks in jail. I tried to put myself in his place, to deal with his outrage. And still, I was consumed with curiosity. But there was no way I could come right out and ask, "Ted, did you do it? Did you do any of it?" There are no rules of social etiquette for questioning an old friend accused of crimes that were so awful.

♥ He referred obliquely to hanging himself, but assured me that he was "hanging in there with nothing but my soul, I will add to your relief."

Apparently, it was not my letter that had turned him around, but a session of handball, which he'd found to be an effective method of catharsis.

"It [handball] has a curious way of draining the bitterness away. Or perhaps it's the body's way of asserting itself over the destructive impulses of the mind, temporarily mindless of the body's uncompromising, unquestioning, eternal desire to survive. The body may only appear as host to the brain, but the intellect, fragile and selfish, is no match for the imperative of life itself. Hanging around, intangibly, is better than being tangibly nothing at all."

♥ The first cup of coffee of the day on the ninth floor in the communications center. Already, the phones were busy, reporters putting copy men on hold, waiting for a daily update. Here, the black humor mounted. Two television reporters mimicked a personal interview with Mrs. Bundy, one of them playing the defendant's mother in a high falsetto:

"And what was Ted like when he was a child, Mrs. Bundy?"

"Oh he was a good boy, a good, normal, All-American boy."

"What kind of toys did he like, Mrs. Bundy?"

"The usual things-guns, knives, panty hose-just like any boy."

"And did he have a job?"

"Oh, no. Teddy always had his credit cards."

Hoots of laughter.

♥ Ted complained that his lawyers ignored his input into the case, would not let him make decisions, and were stubbornly refusing him the right to cross-examine witnesses before the jury.

Cowart was aghast.

"I don't know of any case I've seen or experienced where an individual who is indigent has received the quality and quantity of counsel you have. There have been five separate counsel here representing you. It's unheard of. Who's minding the store for the public defender I can't tell you. And what's happening to all those other indigents they represent I can't tell you. This court has watched with a great deal of carefulness that, before witnesses are tendered, you are questioned, and this record will show hundred of 'just a moment, please' where they [Ted's attorneys] go by and confer with you. I've never seen anything like it in the history of any case I've ever tried. Or in twenty-seven years at the bar have I ever seen anything exactly like what has happened in the defense of this case."

♥ Moving into final arguments, the press was still wagering even odds on the outcome of the trial.

And yet, there seemed to be something happening, something that couldn't be stopped. Ted had spoken of "this railroad train running," and it struck a chord buried deep in the recess of my memory. The outcome of the trial would not necessarily be the wrong verdict; that verdict was something that none of us had control over any longer. The truth had been lost somewhere among the games, the rituals, the motions, the petty arguments and the rational arguments, the quotes for the press, the notations for the record.

In all human endeavors that deal with what is unthinkable, too terrible to be dealt with squarely, we turn to what is familiar and regimented: funerals, wakes, and even wars. Now, in this trial, we had gone beyond our empathy with the pain of the victims, our niggling realization that the defendant was a fragmented personality. He knew the rules, he even knew a great deal about the law, but he did not seem to be cognizant of what was about to happen to him. He seemed to consider himself irrefragable. And what was about to happen to him was vital for the good of society. I could not refute that. It had to be, but it seemed hollow that none of us understood that his ego, our egos, the rituals of the courtroom itself, the jokes and the nervous laughter were veiling the gut reactions that we should all be facing. We were all on "this railroad train running..."

I looked at the jury, and I knew. Never mind the odds. My God, they are going to kill Ted...

..It has taken the jury less than seven hours of deliberation to decide his fate. All those kindly middle-aged women, the devout churchgoers, the people who didn't read newspapers, this jury handpicked by Ted himself. It appeared that they had been eager to debate the question of his guilt, almost as eager to find that he was, indeed, guilty.

Ted is lost to me. He has been lost since I looked at the pictures of the dead girls and I knew what I knew... knew what I had never wanted to believe. There is no need to remain for the penalty phase. Whatever is to come after is already foretold in my mind. They are going to kill him... they are going to kill him... and he knew it all along.

♥ I believed that the verdict had been the right verdict, but I wondered if it had been for the wrong reasons. It had been too swift, too vindictive. Was justice still justice when it manifested itself as it had in the less than six hours of jury deliberation? Was this the delayed justice that should have come before? Perhaps there was no way that it could have been done cleanly, concisely, in a textbook case.

The people had spoken. And Ted was guilty.

♥ Florida-the "Buckle of the Death Belt"-was the worst possible state to which he could have run. No one in Florida had taken kindly to Ted Bundy's mocking superiority, his games. Not the police. Not the judges. And certainly not the public. In Florida, "killers" were killed themselves, and with as much dispatch as possible. An Oregon detective, returning from a seminar in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1978, told me that he had talked with some of the Florida lawmen who had dealt with Ted. "They told me they would have killed him," the detective recalled to me. "They said he would have had an 'accident' while he was still in jail-but they didn't dare because he was too much in the public eye."

"Good ole boys"-policemen and laymen alike-didn't hold with women-killers, with despoilers and rapists. These were the men that Ted had scoffed at in his phone call from Leon County Jail. These were the people who now would control his every move.

He had deliberately walked into the very jaws of death. Why?

♥ There was so much that jury in Miami never heard. They knew nothing about all the dead and missing girls in Washington, nothing about the three dead girls in Utah, nothing about the five dead and missing gilts in Colorado, nothing of the Pensacola fantasy tapes; presumably they did not know that the man before them was felt by many to be the most prolific mass killer in America.

The prosecution had, indeed, avoided any cries of overkill.

And yet, the specter of the electric chair hovered in that courtroom, as surely as if it had been brought in and placed before the bench. Ted expected it, his attorneys expected it, and the public demanded it.

♥ I have been asked a hundred-a thousand-times what I truly believed about Ted Bundy's guilt or innocence, and until now I have always demurred. Now, I would like to attempt to express my thoughts on what made Ted run. It may be presumptuous on my part. I am neither a trained psychiatrist nor a criminologist. Yet, after almost ten years of knowing Ted through all the good times, the bad times, after researching the crimes he has been suspected of and those he has bee convicted of, after agonizing reflection, I realize that I may know Ted as well as anyone has ever known him. And I can only conclude, with the most profound sense of regret, that he can never be healed.

I doubt that Ted will understand the depth of my feeling for him. The knowledge that he is undoubtedly guilty of the grotesque crimes attributed to him in as painful to me as if he were my son, the brother I lost, a man as close to me in many ways as anyone I have ever known. There will never be a time in my life when I will not think of him. I have felt friendship, love, respect, anxiety, sorrow, horror, deep anger, despair, and, at the end, resigned acceptance of what has to be. Like John Henry Browne, and Peggy Good, like his mother and the women who loved him romantically, I have tried to save Ted's life... twice. Once he knew it, and once he didn't. He received the letter I mailed in 1976 wen I begged him not to kill himself, but he never knew that I had tried to arrange a plea bargain in 1979 that might have meant confinement in a mental hospital instead of the trials that led him inexorably toward the electric chair. And, like all the others, I have been manipulated to suit Ted's needs. I don't feel particularly embarrassed or resentful about that; I was one of many, all of us intelligent, compassionate people who had no real comprehension of what possessed him, what drove him obsessively.

Ted came into my life, however peripherally, at a time when all the beliefs I had held smugly for many years had been shattered. True love, marriage, fidelity, selfless motherhood, blind trust-all those marvelous truths were suddenly only wisps of smoke blowing away in a totally unforeseen gust of wind.

But Ted seemed to embody what was young, idealistic, clean, sure, and empathetic. He seemed to ask nothing but friendship. He was, in 1971, a decisive factor in the verification that I was a person of worth, a woman who still had a great deal to give and to reap. He was most assuredly not a predatory male eager to "hit on" a newly divorced woman. He was simply there, listening, reassuring, giving credibility to what I was trying to become. Such a friend is not easy to turn one's back on.

I have no idea what I was to him, what I seemed to remain to him. Perhaps I only gave back to him what he had given to me. I saw him then as quite perfect, and he must have needed that. Perhaps he could sense an emotional strength in me, although I surely did not feel it myself at the time. He may have known that he could count on me when the going grew perilous for him. In times of deepest stress, he would turn to me, again and again. And I did attempt to help him, but I could never really assuage his pain because Ted could never bring himself to expose the soft underbelly of his anguish. He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.

It must have taken incredible effort.

The parameters of that shadow man were constructed with such care; one misstep and they could all come apart.

The Ted Bundy the world was allowed to see was handsome, his body honed and cultivated meticulously, a barrier of strength against eyes that might catch a glimpse of the terror inside. He was brilliant, a student of distinction, witty, glib, and persuasive. He loved to ski, sail, and hike. He favored French cuisine, good white wine, and gourmet cooking. He loved Mozart and obscure foreign films. He knew exactly when to send flowers and sentimental cards. His poems of love were tender and romantic.

And yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old care, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects-more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.

Ted could-and did-rub elbows with the governor, travel in circles that most young men could never hope to enter, but he could never feel good about himself. On the surface Ted Bundy was the very epitome of a successful man. Inside, it was all ashes.

For Ted has gone through life terribly crippled, like a man who is deaf, or blind, or paralyzed. Ted has no conscience.

"Conscience doth make cowards of us all," but conscience is what gives us our humanity, the factor that separates us from animals. It allows us to love, to feel another's pain, and to grow. Whatever the drawbacks are to being blessed with a conscience, the rewards are essential to living in a world with other human beings.

The individual with no conscience-with no superego at all-has long been a focal point for study by psychiatrists and psychologists. The terms used to describe such an individual have changed over the years, but the concept has not. Once it was called a "psychopathic personality," and then it became "sociopath." Today, the term in vogue is "antisocial personality."

To live in our world, with thoughts and actions always counter to the flow of your fellowmen, must be an awesome handicap. There are no innate guidelines to follow: the psychopath might well be a visitor from another planet, struggling to mimic the feelings of those he encounters. It is almost impossible to pinpoint just when antisocial feelings begin, although most experts agree that emotional development has been arrested in early childhood-perhaps as early as three. Usually, the inward-turning of emotions results from a need for love or acceptance not filled, from deprivation and humiliation. Once the process has begun, that little child will grow tall-be he will never mature emotionally.

He may experience pleasure on only a physical level, an excitable "high," and a sense of euphoria from the games he substitutes for real feelings.

He knows what he wants, and because he is not hampered by gut feelings or the needs of others, he can usually achieve instant gratification. But he can never fill up the lonesome void inside. He is insatiable, always hungry.

The antisocial personality is mentally ill, but not in the classic sense or within our legal framework. He is invariably highly intelligent and has long since learned the proper responses, the tricks and techniques that will please those from whom he wants something. He is subtle, calculating, clever, and dangerous. And he is lost.

♥ But it didn't seem to be enough. His revenge brought no lessening of the void in his soul, and it must have been a terrible realization for him; he had worked, planned, schemed so that he could reject Stephanie, sure that he would feel whole and serene again, ad yet he still felt empty.

He still had Meg, and Meg loved him devotedly, would have married him in a minute. But Meg was too much like Louise; any love he felt for either of them was tempered with scorn for their weakness. Somehow, he would have to punish Stephanie more.

It was, of course, only three days after Stephanie left Seattle in January of 1974 that Joni Lenz was bludgeoned and raped symbolically with the metal bed rod as she lay sleeping in her basement room.

And so the answer to the question put to me so many times is yes. Yes, I believe Ted Bundy attacked Joni Lenz, just as I now am forced to believe that he is responsible for all the other crimes attributed to him. I have never said it our loud-or in print-but I believe it, as devoutly as I wish I did not.

The victims are all prototypes of Stephanie. The same long hair, parted in the middle, the same perfectly even features. None of them were random choices. I think some of them were chosen-watched for long periods before the attacks occurred-while others were picked randomly because they were convenient targets during those times when Ted was in the grip of his maniacal compulsion.

But they all resembled Stephanie, that first woman who had pierced Ted's carefully constructed facade and revealed the yawning vulnerability beneath. That damage to Ted's ego could never be forgiven. None of the crimes filled the emptiness. He had to keep killing Stephanie over and over again, hoping that each time would be the time that would bring surcease. But the more there were, the worse it became.

Ted had said that "my fantasies are taking over my life," and I don't believe that he had any control over them. The compulsion that hem mentioned in his first letter to me after his arrest in Pensacola dominated Ted; Ted did not dominate the compulsion. He could manipulate other people, but God help him, he could not stop himself.

He also said that acting out his fantasies was a "downer," and the depths of those downers can only be imagined by a rational mind. Since an antisocial personality has no empathy at all for others, it was not his victims' pain that tormented him; it was that there was no relief for him.

All of his victims were so lovely, so carefully chosen, that during the time they were living players in his obsessive rituals, he thought he cared for them. The rituals themselves left the chosen limp, bleeding, and ugly. Why did it have to be that way? He detested them for dying, for becoming ugly, for leaving him-again-alone. And, in the midst of the awful aftermath of the fantasies, he could not truly comprehend that it was he who had wrought the destruction.

Madness, yes, but madness is what I am trying to understand. Holding the reins of power was no fun when there was no one left to terrorize with that power.

I think the rest of the carefully regimented games came about accidentally, an extension of the killing games. Driven by rage, revenge, frustration, Ted killed. The sexual aspect of the murders was not a matter of satiating his drives, but rather the need to humiliate and demean his victims; he felt no true sexual release-only the blackest of depressions.

It was only after the killings that Ted realized just how newsworthy he was. He began to exult in the thrill of the chase, and it became a part of the ritual, a part even more satisfying than the murders themselves. His power over the dead girls lasted such a short time, but his power over the police investigators went on and on. That he could do these things, take more and more chances, refine his disguises so that he could come out in the light of day-and still remain undetected-was the ultimate euphoria. He could do what no other man could do, and do it with impunity.

How often he would talk to me of being in the limelight, being the Golden Boy. It became life and breath to him.

And the games became more intricate. When Ted was finally arrested in Utah in 1975 by Sergeant Bob Hayward, he was outraged. One must understand that he actually felt this sense of indignation. As an antisocial personality, he could feel no guilt. He had only taken what he wanted, what he needed to feel whole. He was incapable of understanding that one cannot fulfill his own desires at the expense of others. He had not finished with the games, and the stupid police had ended them before he was ready.

When Ted complained throughout the years about jails, prisons, the courts, the judges, the district attorneys, the police, and the press, he was not aware that there was another side to it all. His reasoning was simplistic, but to him it made sense. What Ted wanted, Ted should have, and there was the blind spot on his superior intelligence. When he wept, he wept only for himself, but his tears were real tears. He was desperate, and afraid, and angry, and he believed that he was completely within his rights.

To convince him otherwise would be akin to explaining the theory of relativity to a kindergarten child. The mechanisms needed to understand the needs and rights of others are not integrated into his thinking processes.

Even today, I cannot hate him for that; I can only feel profound pity.

♥ There is, within all imperfect mechanisms, a tendency to self-destruct, as if the machine itself realizes that it is not functioning correctly. Wen the mechanism is a human being, those destructive forces writhe their way to the surface from time to time. Somewhere, hidden deeply in the recesses of Ted's brain, there is a synapse of cells that is trying to destroy him.

Perhaps that first Ted, the small-child-Ted who could have become all that was promised, knows that the Ted who has taken over must be done away with. Or is that too farfetched? The fact remains that Ted has constantly struck out at the very people who have tried to defend him. Over and over, he has fired his attorneys-sometimes within sight of victory. He chose the most dangerous state in the union to flee to, knowing that the death penalty was a real threat there. Given a chance to plea bargain for his very life, he tore up the motion that would have saved him and virtually dared the state prosecutors to convict him-a challenge they were only too willing to accept. I think he wants to die. I don't know if he realizes that he does.

In my opinion, Ted is not a Jekyll-Hyde. I have no doubt at all that he remembers the murders. There may be some overlapping, some blurring-just as a man may not remember distinctly every woman he had ever slept with. How many times has he told me that he is able to put the bad things that have happened to him out of his mind? The memories may lie hidden like festering boils-but he does remember. The memories can no longer be left behind, because he has no place left to run, and they must haunt his call in Raiford Prison.

My own memory haunts me.

♥ Killing Ted will accomplish nothing at all; all it would assure is that he could never kill again. But looking at the broken, confused man in the courtroom, I knew that Ted was insane. I cannot justify executing a man who is insane. Placing him in a mental institution-with the tightest security possible-could perhaps do more toward psychiatric research into the causes and, hopefully, cures of the antisocial personality than the evaluation of any other individual in history. It might save the potential victims of antisocial personalities still being formed. Ted can never go free; he is dangerous and he will always be dangerous, but there are answers to vital questions locked in his mind.

I don't want him to die. If the day comes when he is led into the death chamber at Raiford Prison, I will cry. I will cry for that long-lost Ted Bundy who might have been, for the bright, warm young man I thought I knew so many years ago. It is still difficult for me to believe that the facade of kindness and caring I saw was only that, a thin veneer. There could have been-should have been-so much more.

But if Ted is to die, I think he will muster the strength to do it with style, basking for the last time in the glow of strobe lights and television cameras. If he is relegated to the ranks of prisoners-the General Population-that will be the worst punishment of all. If he is not killed by his fellow prisoners, who have been vocal that "Bundy should fry," the emptiness inside himself will destroy him.

♥ One day, the earth and the rivers may give up more remains, all that is left of the young women whose names are still unknown-the women Ted referred to when he said, "Add one more digit to that and you'll have it..."

None of them could fill the hollow soul of Ted Bundy.

♥ Carol Ann took the stand to plead to Ted's life.

But first, and seemingly foremost, she had a mission; she wanted to become Mrs. Ted Bundy. She had meticulously researched how one got married in Florida, given the peculiar circumstances. She knew that public declaration, properly phrased, in an open courtroom in the presence of court officers would make the "ceremony" legal. A notary public, holding the marriage license in the names of Carole Ann Boone and Theodore Robert Bundy, sat watching as Ted rose to question his fiancée.

The bride wore not white, but black-a skirt and sweater over an open-necked blouse. The groom, who had always favored bow ties, wore one with blue polka dots and a blue sports jacket. The jury wore looks of utter bemusement.

The couple smiled at each other, as if they were the only two people in the courtroom, as he began to question her formally.

..He rose to question her on redirect. This time he knew what he was supposed to say to be sure the marriage was valid.

"Will you marry me?" Ted asked Carole Ann.

"Yes!" she replied with a giggle and a broad smile.

"Then I do hereby marry you."

♥ There would be appeals ahead, predicted to take years, but for all intents and purposes, the Ted Bundy story was over. Locked away from the rays of the limelight, the rays that for Ted seem necessary to sustain life, I know that he will continue to sink deeper and deeper into the compulsive madness that grips him. He will never again by the Golden Boy beloved by the media.

Ted Bundy is a killer. A three-times convicted killer, a throwaway man now.

I cannot forget his phone call in October 1975, the call where he said calmly, "I'm in a little trouble-but it's all going to work out. If anything goes wrong, you'll read about it in the newspapers."