Read Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters Online
Authors: Peter Vronsky
Janice Graham later told police that a man approached her with a broken arm at about noon that Sunday. He was dressed all in white—white T-shirt, socks, tennis shoes, and shorts. He asked her if she would help him load his small sailboat onto the roof of his car. She agreed and began to walk with him. She said he was very friendly, polite, and charming. He told her he injured his arm playing racquetball and they chatted the entire route. When they got to his car, a bronze-colored Volkswagen, Janice saw no boat or trailer. “It’s at my parents’ house, just at the top of the hill,” the stranger said, asking her to get into his car.
Janice refused because some friends were waiting for her. He should have told her, she said, that the boat was at his parents’ house. The stranger was not at all upset, he apologized and walked back with her from the parking lot. Janice later told the police, “He was very polite at all times. Very sincere. Easy to talk to. He was real friendly and he had a nice smile.”
In an interview, Bundy talked about encountering his victims in his third person manner:
BUNDY
: Conversation, to remove himself from the personal aspects of the encounter, the interchange. Chattering and flattering and entertaining, as if seen through a motion picture screen. He would be engaging in the patter just for the purpose of making the whole encounter seem legitimate and to keep her at ease. He didn’t want this girl to get second thoughts about going with him to his place. And, also, he was afraid if he started thinking about what he was going to do he’d become more nervous or lose his concentration or in some way betray himself.
QUESTION
: So there’s a very delicate balance between being cool and the excitement?
BUNDY
: Well, it’s a critical balance, not a delicate balance. It became almost like acting a role. It wasn’t difficult. The more an actor acts in a role, the better he becomes at it, the more he is apt to feel comfortable in it, to be able to do things spontaneously. And get better, as it were, in his role.
93
Shortly after meeting her friends, Janice Graham saw that the stranger had found somebody else to help him. He was walking back toward his car next to a young woman with a bicycle. Janice wondered where she was going to put her bicycle for the trip to get the man’s boat.
Twenty-three-year old Jan Ott, a Seattle probation officer, bicycled that day to Lake Sammamish for some sunbathing and swimming. She found a spot on the edge of the lake, not too far from several couples who were enjoying the sun, and spread out her towel. One couple testified that she was there for about half an hour when a handsome young man approached her. He was dressed entirely in white and his left arm was in a sling, encased in a cast from his wrist to past his elbow. He spoke with a slight English accent. He asked Jan if she could help him load his boat. Just to show how fast serial killers learn and adapt, this time Bundy told Ott that the boat was at his “parents’ house.” She did not leave immediately with him and they talked for about ten minutes. Witnesses overheard him introducing himself as “Ted.” Eventually Jan got up and left with the handsome stranger. Several couples testified that they overheard him telling her that there was room in his car for her bike and talking about how easy it would be for him to teach her how to sail in a single afternoon. Jan Ott was reported missing the next day by her roommate. Her bike was never found.
It wasn’t over yet. About two hours after Ott walked off with the stranger, several women reported being approached near the park washrooms by a man dressed in white with a broken arm needing help with his sailboat. One woman turned him down because he grabbed at her while asking for help with his boat. Another saw him watching her before he approached her with his request and practically ran from him. Bundy was like some kind of killing animal loose in a herd of prey.
Nineteen-year-old Denise Naslund and her boyfriend, Kenny Little, were sunning themselves in the park. At one point Denise got up to go to the washroom. Kenny fell asleep. When he woke up, Denise still had not returned—her purse lay nearby where she had left it. Kenny attempted to report Denise’s disappearance to the park police, but was told that only family could file a missing person report. He drove back to her parents’ house and they called the police. Witnesses later recalled seeing Denise in the washrooms, but afterward there was nothing.
Liz remembers Ted phoning her that Sunday late in the afternoon—about an hour after Denise’s boyfriend discovered that she had disappeared. Ted invited Liz out to dinner—he was starving, he told her. He arrived about ten minutes later and they drove to a bowling alley reputed to serve some of the best hamburgers in Seattle. Liz was amazed to see Ted gobble down two hamburgers. He looked like he was under stress, she said. His eyes were all puffed up and when she asked him about it, he said he had a cold and was tired. Nonetheless, he insisted on driving back to Liz’s house and transferring a ski rack that he had borrowed from his car to hers.
By this time, the various police agencies had met and although they had little tangible evidence, they had good reason to suspect that the kidnappings were committed by the same individual. The police had identified distinct similarities in the student victims:
The police reviewed the witness statements and isolated the reports of a man wearing a cast and driving a Volkswagen. The disappearances at Lake Sammamish now gave them a name: Ted. But that was all they had, and the police did not agree among themselves that the same man had committed the crimes.
Using witness descriptions from the Lake Sammamish disappearances, newspapers published police sketches of the suspect and the information that he was driving a Volkswagen and might be called Ted. A lot of people ribbed Bundy about the fact that he had a Volkswagen, was called Ted, and looked like the individual in the sketches. Everyone felt safe kidding Bundy about it, because few believed that he could even be remotely capable of committing those kinds of crimes.
That summer, Ann Rule was among the first to call the police with Ted Bundy’s name. She remembers that she did not know whether Ted had bought a car since she had seen him last, but it appeared to her that Ted resembled the police sketches published in the papers. She had a friend on the police force run Bundy’s name through vehicle registration records and was shocked to find out that “her” Ted also drove a Volkswagen.
Liz was also seeing the resemblance and could not shake the memory of finding the box of medical cast material. She made an anonymous call to the police. But neither Ann Rule nor Liz Kendall, despite their suspicions, was convinced that Ted was a killer. Rule continued her friendship with Bundy, and Liz continued working on marriage plans with him.
The police meanwhile, filed Bundy’s name with the other 3,000 names reported to them as possible suspects.
On August 2, in Vancouver, Washington, twenty-year-old Carol Valenzuela vanished, but it was thought that she left on her own and no alarm was raised about her disappearance.
Ted Bundy, in the meantime, at the end of the month packed his things and moved to Salt Lake City in Utah to attend law school there. No further disappearances were reported in the State of Washington.
On September 7, in the Issaquah hills about a mile from Lake Sammamish, hunters discovered the remains of Jan Ott and Denise Naslund. There was not much to find—their bodies had been torn apart by coyotes, rodents, and possibly bears. Their flesh was mostly stripped away, and bones and tufts of hair were scattered all over the area. It took the police days to assemble enough bones to identify the women. Worse yet, the police anthropologists discovered extra female bones—there was a third victim. To this day, her identity remains unknown but it could have been Georgann Hawkins, whose body was never officially found.
Then in October the body of Carol Valenzuela was discovered near Olympia, Washington, in the rugged territory close to the Oregon border. She too had been consumed by animals. Lying near her, the police found the body of another woman believed to be aged between eighteen and twenty-two. Her identity has never been established either.
In the Salt Lake City area, young women began disappearing on October 2. The first was sixteen-year-old Nancy Wilcox, who on a night when she had argued with her parents was seen getting into a Volkswagen bug. She was listed as a runaway at first. Her body was never found. Salt Lake City is some seven hundred miles south of Seattle, and nobody in Utah even remotely thought of making a connection between the Volkswagen and the crimes in the north, nor was there any national database like VICAP today to make that link.
On October 18, Melissa Smith, age seventeen, the daughter of a police chief of a small town near Salt Lake City, vanished. She went out around 9:00
P
.
M
. to eat a pizza with a friend. Afterward she was seen at a few teen hangouts around the town and was reported at one point to be seen hitchhiking.
Her body was found ten days later, the first of the series of victims to be found reasonably intact enough to perform an autopsy. Her skull had been fractured by a heavy blow, and she had been strangled by one of her knee-high socks tightly wrapped around her throat. Her head and shoulders showed multiple bruises and lacerations. She had been raped and sodomized, and afterward sticks had been pushed into her vagina. Her makeup was completely undisturbed and her long fingernails were undamaged. This led the police to believe that the killer may have kept her in an unconscious state for several days, applying her makeup himself and repeatedly raping her before finally strangling her.
On October 31, Halloween night, seventeen-year-old Laura Aime disappeared. She was at a party, got bored, and decided to hitchhike downtown to get some cigarettes. Her body was found the next month in a canyon. Her jaw had been broken and her skull was fractured. She had been raped and sodomized, and one of her stockings was wrapped tightly around her throat. There were vaginal puncture wounds from a sharp instrument, believed to be an ice pick, thrust into her genitals. The one thing that immediately struck the police was that her hair was freshly shampooed and free of blood from her cranial wounds. Again, as with Melissa Smith, it appeared that the killer had kept the teenager in an unconscious state, shampooing her hair, raping her, and then strangling her.
On November 8, Carol DaRonch was approached in a shopping mall by Ted Bundy posing as a police officer and lured into his car. As he attempted to put a pair of handcuffs on her, she managed kick free of him and flee. DaRonch is the only known victim of Ted Bundy’s to escape.
Later that same night, at an evening performance by a high school drama club, young women and girls were approached by an impeccably dressed man and asked to come into the parking lot and identify a car, or help him start a car. The request made no sense and the man appeared very nervous and would not look the women in the eye. Everybody refused the stranger’s request. His actions attracted the attention of a few people among the audience of 1,500 and they kept an eye on him that evening. During the intermission they saw him leave, and were happy to see that he did not return when the play began again. However, when the play ended and the lights went up, they were surprised to see that he was back in the auditorium, although now his shirttail was hanging out and his hair seemed somewhat disordered.
Dean and Belva Kent were among those who never noticed the man. They were sitting with their daughter, seventeen-year-old Debra Kent. During the intermission, Debra left the auditorium to pick up her brother from a nearby skating rink. She used the school pay phone to call him and say she was on her way and walked out of the school toward her parents’ car. She then vanished. The car was found parked as it was when they first arrived at the school. Debra’s body was never found.
Thirteen murders in ten months, and there were more to come. While the police in Utah hunkered down for what they expected to be more murders in December, nothing happened. Ted was back in Seattle for the Christmas holiday.
In Seattle, after the discovery of the first bodies, the investigation had mobilized into a major effort. The police had a list of 3,000 names that had been phoned in—including Ted Bundy’s four times by now. The 3,000 names were fed into a computer. The names of Volkswagen owners in Washington State were added, the names of all the friends of victims, names from their address books, class lists of all the missing girls’ fellow students, all mental patients in the state for the last ten years, known sex offenders, names of motel guests near Lake Sammamish, and even names of people renting horses to ride in the district. The computer was then programmed to print out any names that appeared twice. Nearly six hundred names emerged. The computer was asked to print out any names that appeared four times—and the computer responded with four hundred names, including Ted Bundy’s. This time, the computer was asked to print out five coincidental appearances of the same name. The computer identified twenty-five names for the police to investigate. Bundy was not one of them.