Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (12 page)

As he entered his teenage years, a pattern began to emerge; when he was in the grips of the downside of his depression he lied, he stole, he manipulated others, he felt no empathy and no responsibility for his own actions and— eventually—he killed. Alcohol or marijuana helped him to act on his impulses and act out his fantasies. When he was on a manic upswing, he would move, change colleges, and change majors. Then his moods would drop again, and he couldn’t go to classes, would sabotage himself and his relationships, drop out of school, drink, smoke pot, prowl, steal, and kill. He called them his “frenzy episodes,” even while continuing to proclaim his innocence.

Dr. Dorothy Lewis, the psychiatrist who worked on Ted’s behalf near the end of his life, testified that Ted had “no insight into these wide fluctuations” before she documented his ups and downs. She could chart his mood swings to when he had committed crimes. There would be an upswing of mania that would lead to killings; the depression came after—not over his hurting someone, but over the physical release killing provided him. She says that during his “frenzy episodes” his compulsions would build, and what little impulse control he had lessened. Only killing would quiet his rage.

She saw a metamorphosis, too, which she explained as a kind of a dissociative state similar to a fugue state or a hysterical state. “….These are times when sometimes individuals go off and don’t even know who they are for a period of time, and wind up somewhere else in the country,” she testified to a Florida court. “And they don’t know how they got there…..my guess is there is abnormal brain activity, but we don’t, we just don’t know what causes them. Certainly there is something episodically going on that is aberrant and abnormal.”

An associate of Dr. Lewis’ involved in testing Ted concluded that he had experienced “severe early deprivation.” And early deprivation is as serious as any other kind of child abuse.

But his parents and half-siblings saw nothing, or said they saw nothing. To his mother, Louise, he would always be the thoughtful young man who never forgot to send flowers on Mother’s Day. His half-sister, Linda Bussey, six years younger than Ted and the oldest of Louise and Johnnie’s four children, recalls only “a great childhood, super great parents.” The man who finally admitted to killing dozens of young women—and hinted of many more—was, according to Bussey, “not the person I knew.”

Bussey still lives in Tacoma, near where Louise and Ted first settled and just blocks from the UPS campus and the Burr home. Repeating “it was a great childhood,” is all she will say about Ted’s early years. She says she never talked with Ted about who his birth father was, and claims she has never given any thought to what made Ted arguably the most famous serial killer in America. Her explanation of their childhood and home life is much like Ted and Louise denying there was anything amiss at his grandparent’s house.

Without question, the most complicated relationship of Ted’s life was with his mother. For most of his life, Ted Bundy would tell himself—and others—conflicting stories about his parentage. When he confided his illegitimacy to Ann Rule (a friend and co-worker at a crisis hotline in Seattle who was writing a book about the search for a young killer with only a first name, “Ted”), he said he was raised believing that Louise was his sister and that he was a “late baby” born to Samuel and Eleanor Cowell. A college girlfriend, who under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall wrote about her six-year long relationship with Ted, stated that he cried when he told her about finding out he was illegitimate.

“Ted told a little different story to everybody. He lied all the time,” said Rule. “It was very hard to tell when Ted was being genuine,” according to Stephen Michaud, who believes it is “entirely possible” that his grandfather, Samuel Cowell, was Ted’s father.

Some heard a story about Ted’s cousin taunting him about being illegitimate; some saw him angry and resentful of his mother for the embarrassment of his birth. To others he told a story about how he had “found” his birth certificate, saying “father unknown.” Still other close teenage friends say Ted never mentioned his illegitimacy.

“My impression is that Ted felt humiliated by circumstances of his birth. He felt alone in that shame,” said his last attorney, Polly Nelson. And Nelson, as well as boyhood friends of Ted’s, said he had only a slight relationship with his step-father. “I had the impression that Johnnie didn’t exist at all; he ignored him,” Nelson said. The circumstances of his birth set the stage for Ted’s complicated relationship with Louise. “If she was humiliated when he was born, imagine her humiliation when he was arrested,” said Nelson.

There is great sympathy for the people fated to be the parents of Ted Bundy (except from those authors, psychiatrists or investigators who hoped to get Louise Bundy to give them insights into Ted, and found her unhelpful). Sandi Holt, who knew Louise and Johnnie Bundy from Cub Scout outings and as the parents of her brother’s friend, said Louise was “very loving, caring and nurturing to Ted. I saw it in her participating in scouting.”

But longtime family friends, and some relatives, call the Bundys a secretive family. Ted’s cousin, Edna Martin, said “nobody knows” who Ted’s father was—and that her parents never knew. “We did hear that rumor” that Ted was born of an incestuous encounter, Martin said. “I think Ted had a real need to find out who he was. He was relieved Johnnie wasn’t his father.” She calls the Bundys “a close family” and her cousin Ted “a close friend.” Like Doug Holt, her brother, John, considered Ted his best friend. Yet, Ted envied the Cowell’s lifestyle, the music always present in the house, the foreign sports cars, and the trips to Europe.

Those who got to know the family only after Ted’s arrests have strong opinions, too. “I wouldn’t call her cold,” attorney Polly Nelson said of Louise. “I’d call her controlled. She wasn’t a bad person, or a drunk, she was a simple person. She was so overwhelmed that she didn’t have anything to give him. He didn’t admire her, he had contempt. He was really envious of his half-siblings, how comfortable and easy it was for them.”

Stephen Michaud said Ted lied to his parents about his crimes for years and that they believed Ted was innocent— until Michaud arrived in Tacoma with a tape recorder to play them one of Ted’s confessions. “His mother was simply another person to use,” Michaud said.

BEV THREW HERSELF into the blackberry brambles. Her family thought she was simply working to clear the land near her father’s cabins on Fox Island. But she knew what she was doing was a form of atonement. Her arms bled, her hands bled, her legs bled, and she wanted them to. Bev was not one to cry, so maybe the pain, the isolation of the work, the scrapes, and the bleeding, would distract her and give her an outward way to mourn. As Tom Robbins would write, “Nothing, not mushrooms, not ferns, not moss, not melancholy, nothing grew more vigorously, more intractably in the Puget Sound rains than blackberries.”

Well, maybe in Bev’s case, melancholy might defeat the blackberries. It was one year since Ann had vanished, and the family was back at the place that held many happy family memories, and some imperfect ones, too, if Bev was honest with herself. Photographs taken every summer had nearly the same pose: Mary, Greg, Julie, and Ann, with Barney, the cocker spaniel, lined up, youngest to oldest, left to right. Now there was a vacant space where Ann should be. The blackberry bushes presented an opportunity to Bev. “I thought, this will get my anger and feelings out so I’ll do it ‘till it’s done.”

Tacoma police had spent 5,000 man hours looking for Ann. Eight hundred soldiers, volunteers, police officers and Boy Scouts had searched. Police had questioned 1,500 people in just the first 12 days of the investigation and given polygraphs to 200 of them. Detectives had lived in Bev’s basement for a month, waiting for a credible ransom demand that never came. Julie was the most troubled by her sister’s disappearance. The other children were too young to comprehend what had happened. For five-yearold Greg, it was a bit of a lark. He liked the novelty of the police around their house and announced that he wanted to be a detective when he grew up.

Police departments in 200 cities in the west were urged to be on the lookout for Ann. Bev spent hours at the library, finding the names and addresses of newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. She composed a news release and sent a copy to at least one newspaper in every major city. She had inquiries back from only one or two. Bev carried a stack of the missing poster with Ann’s photo wherever she went; police had mailed twenty thousand of them to other law enforcement agencies.

The daily visits from Detectives Ted Strand and Tony Zatkovich had slowed, but the two paid a one-year anniversary visit to Bev and Don, extending their sympathies and letting the family know they were still on the case. The Tacoma and Seattle newspapers ran stories acknowledging the one-year mark and updating the investigation. The headline on one in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
read, “Police detectives fear the happy, plump-cheeked child was carried off by a mental or sexual deviate.” Another headline read: “Strange Mystery Strengthens Faith of Grieved Parents.” In an odd restaging, Bev was photographed tucking Mary, now four years old, into what had been Ann’s bed. “Mary Cried the Night Sister Ann Vanished a Year Ago,” the caption states. Julie didn’t want to stay in the bedroom she had shared with Ann, so she changed rooms, and Mary moved into it. But the illustrations on the wall, the headboard, the lamps, and bedspread and ruffles remained Ann’s.

As painful as the newspaper stories were, Bev knew that reminders of Ann’s disappearance could prompt leads in the case. Bev, who knew her dream of being a writer had died, still had the journalist’s instinct to chronicle everything. She carefully collected the articles and began to paste them in Ann’s baby book. Following pages detailing her daughter’s first steps, birthdays, and other childhood milestones (“she is aware of strangers,” Bev wrote when Ann turned one), there were now clippings about her disappearance. An album created after 1961 was labeled simply “After Ann.” Dozens would follow.

By the time Bev was tearing at the blackberry vines, Detectives Strand and Zatkovich had spent hundreds of nights sitting in their car, smoking, and dissecting the Burr case. Their respite was flying lessons and then the purchase of a small plane. They kept it at an airfield in Fife, a small town east of Tacoma. They would fly their families down the Washington and Oregon coastline. Their years in a patrol car, and then as detectives, had made them “closer than brothers.” “You couldn’t get any closer,” is how Strand’s son Ted (the third generation in his family named Ted Strand) describes them.

In 1961, they were in their late 40s and were Tacoma’s reigning crime fighters. They had survived the vigilante years, when, convinced that some police and city leaders were taking graft, they led dozens of other policemen on surprise raids of gambling and liquor establishments. They were fired by the city official they had embarrassed. But the town, especially the PTA, the Council of Churches, and the local newspapers, were outraged about the treatment of the police officers and of how the town fathers tolerated vice, all because a certain amount of gambling and prostitution should be expected in a seaport town.

After weeks of hearings packed with “overflow crowds,” and the accusation by one of the former vigilantes that the two detectives were themselves on the take, they were reinstated with back pay. Zatkovich and Strand were assigned to what they considered Siberia, a beat in an area of the city so remote that it clearly showed they were in still in disfavor with their supervisors. But they remained popular with the newspaper reporters, who looked for any occasion to write about the two, even their arrest of a trick-or-treater who had vandalized a neighborhood on Halloween. By 1951, Zatkovich had lost his badge three times. Still, he was named Police Chief that year; within three months he had mouthed off to the city council and was sent back to the streets in a patrol car. He never stopped being outspoken, including about women police officers. He said they made him “sick,” and in a newspaper interview called them “women bulls.”

Strand stood by Zatkovich when his partner accidentally shot and killed a teenage girl as he chased a suspected felon. Because of lingering hard feelings with city government, Zatkovich was charged with second-degree murder. A jury acquitted him, and he was restored to duty, again. The duo seemed to have nine lives.

Strand’s four children were older than Zatkovich’s two sons, and by 1961, Strand was a grandfather four times over; Zatkovich’s sons were at Wilson High School (where they knew a boy named Ted Bundy). The Strands and the Zatkovichs camped together and went on flying trips, but Ted and Tony’s friendship was the catalyst for the families socializing. Ted and Tony were each other’s yin and yang. Strand was the cool headed one; Zatkovich wasn’t.

At their respective homes, the detectives didn’t talk about the Burr case; together, it was almost all they could think about. They had never
not
solved a major case. In addition to speaking with the Burrs regularly, the detectives had stayed in touch with the other Donald Burr, the architect, the one who also had a young daughter. He remained convinced that his daughter had been the intended target. After tracing the movements of Burr’s first wife, the mother of young Debra Sue Burr, Strand and Zatkovich had not been able to place Poldi or her husband Emile in the Tacoma area in 1961. There were lots of sightings of their make and model of car—a T-bird convertible with Illinois plates—but the detectives were almost certain that Poldi was in her native Austria in early August, the month Ann disappeared. What they couldn’t determine is where she went when she left Vienna on August 19.

Nineteen hundred sixty-two wasn’t a summer Bev looked forward to, but neither was any summer. “I never liked summer. Something always goes wrong,” she remembered. It was summer, 1942, when Bev’s closest friend, along with thousands of other Japanese, was expelled from Tacoma.