The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History (2 page)

Colorado: Michael J. Fisher, chief investigator, Pitkin County District Attorney's Office, retired; Beth Bascom, chief investigator, Pitkin County District Attorney's Office.

Idaho: Russell T. Reneau, chief investigator, Idaho Attorney General's Office, retired; Randall Everitt, former criminal investigator, Idaho Attorney General's Office; Robert Cooper, Idaho Attorney General's Office; Ellen Meyers, records custodian, Pocatello Police Department.

Florida: Detective Donald Patchen, Tallahassee Police Department, retired; Rick Courtemanche, assistant city attorney, Tallahassee; records department, Lake City Police Department; Officer David McCranie, media representative, Tallahassee Police Department; Holly G. Sinco, Adam Watson, and R. Boyd Murphree, archivists, State Archives of Florida.

I would also like to thank the following individuals: William Hagmaier, former FBI agent and close confidant of Theodore Bundy for the last several years of his life; Curt Crawford, FBI; Dr. Ronald M. Holmes; James Massie, who initially introduced me to Jerry Thompson, and was an important link to the story of the Bundy murders; the staff of the Louisville Free Public Library; and Dr. James Holmberg, the Filson Club Historical Society.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
vi

Preface
1

1. A Time of Terror
13

2. Birth, Boyhood, and Beyond
47

3. Metamorphosis
73

4. Nightmare in Utah
85

5. A Lethal Colorado Winter
119

6. Springtime Doesn't Always Mean New Life
132

7. Out of the Shadows
143

8. So You're the One!
155

9. Cat and Mouse
165

10. Conviction
173

11. Escape to Tallahassee
187

12. Lake City
208

13. "Going west at someone else's expense"
219

14. A Very Public End
232

Afterword
243

Chapter
Notes
247

Bibliography
251

Index
253

PREFACE

The nights had been hot in Tacoma, Washington, that August of 1961. Yet for the Burr family of 3009 North 14th Street, it was more than the summer heat that was troubling them. For the past several weeks, Donald and Beverly Burr had been awakened each night by strange noises in their yard; noises not made by the nocturnal ramblings of the local wildlife, but something distinctly more human. And this rising concern of the Burrs that someone might be paying special attention to them as they slept would prove to be tragically accurate.

It was on the evening of August 31, as a heavy rainstorm was still pounding its way across the city that the Burr family made its way to bed. Eightyear-old Ann Marie and her little sister Mary would be sleeping upstairs, while the parents remained in their first-floor bedroom. The two oldest siblings, weary of the summer's heat, decided it would be cooler in the basement and headed downstairs. And so, amidst the occasional flashes of lighting and the rolling of distant, drum-like thunder, the Burr family drifted off to sleep. But at some point in the middle of the night, Mary, whose arm was in a cast from a recent break, woke up crying and was taken to her parents' room by Ann Marie. After consoling her, Beverly Burr quietly told Ann Marie to lead her little sister back to bed, and the children returned upstairs.

When Mrs. Burr arose that morning at 5:00 A.M., these troubling feelings had not dissipated. Yet absolutely nothing could have prepared her for what awaited just beyond the bedroom door. As she stepped into the hallway she saw that not only was a front room window raised, but the front door was standing wide open as well. Gripped with fear, Mrs. Burr quickly made the determination that Ann Marie was missing.

Awakened to a nightmare, the Burrs immediately called the police, and the first of many searches for their daughter began. Acting on his own, the distraught father began combing the neighborhood for Ann Marie. As he approached the University of Puget Sound, situated but two blocks from the Burr residence, he came upon a young construction worker standing at the bottom of a watery pit and stirring up the water with his foot. Donald Burr found this behavior rather odd and later wondered if this person might have had something to do with his daughter's disappearance.

As dawn broke on the first September morning of 1961, the police investigation was in full swing, and later that day one hundred soldiers from nearby Fort Lewis, as well as fifty Washington State National Guardsmen, would join police and civilian searchers alike in the quest to locate the missing girl. It was as if all Tacoma was involved in the desperate search, yet despite these and other efforts in the coming days and weeks, little Ann Marie would never be found.

It is thought that whoever snatched the child entered the house through the living room window; a window that had been closed, but not latched, the night before. But however the intruder gained entry into the home, it was done very quietly. The Burrs' dog made little or no noise that night (the initial police report did mention the dog barking at some point, but that might not have been all that unusual), and it appears the girl was simply awakened from sleep and led out of the house through the front door. Her abductor had moved through the dwelling with stealth, leaving grass clippings but nothing of himself behind. Indeed, the only direct evidence the investigators would find was a shoe print in the muddy grass next to an overturned bench, which was below the unlatched living room window. As they milled about, detectives soon learned there would be little they would glean from the crime scene, as no fingerprints beyond those of the Burr family were found. And after several frustrating months, many came to the harsh conclusion there was little chance of solving the case. The trail, it seems, if there ever was one, had long since grown cold. This of course provided no comfort to a grieving family or a bewildered community, but there was little else they could do. The distant future, however, might hold the key to some long-awaited answers.

On Saturday, May 9, 1987, an article appeared in the local section of The Tacoma News Tribune. At the top of page one screamed a headline in bold print: "Expert says Bundy killed girl, 8, when he was 14."

Theodore Robert Bundy, who had been on death row in Florida since the late 1970s, had by this time made numerous references to murders he had committed, but only in the third person. Following this same pattern in an interview with Dr. Ronald Holmes, he made statements indicating he was, in fact, responsible for Ann Marie Burr's disappearance. The following is taken directly from that May 1987 article:

Bundy talked of "a person" involved in a series of murders in Washington near Lake Sammamish State Park. "I then asked him if it would be reasonable to assume that this `other person' may have had earlier victims," Holmes said. "He said, `Well, this other person we're talking about may have started much earlier."'

After making the obvious connection between himself (Lake Sammamish) and the killer of Ann Marie Burr, Bundy posits that perhaps this person's first murder may have involved a female as young as eight or nine.

Later in the interview Bundy explains how this "other person" could have abducted Ann, and begins reciting certain facts which are accurate to the case. True, Bundy could have learned these things many years earlier after reading about the events, but he may also know them from having first-hand knowledge of the crime. After all, why would he go to such lengths to implicate himself?

Was it the adolescent Theodore Bundy prowling about the Burr yard at night, peering into their windows? The same person the world would later come to know as the articulate and handsome law student-turned-serial killer, who snatched little Ann Marie Burr from her bed, just so he could fulfill his homicidal fantasies? No one will ever know.

What is known is that while Bundy lived about three miles from the Burrs, he did have an uncle who lived close to where Ann Marie took piano lessons, and because he spent time with this uncle, it is at least possible he could have seen the child, even spoken to her. It is also known that, as an adult, prior to his being obsessed with murder, he was a Peeping Tom, so prowling around her house in the dark, if it pleased the future killer, would not have been out of the question. As a full-fledged murderer, he had no hesitation at entering houses at night inhabited by sleeping people. So gaining entry into the Burr home could have been just the first of such assaults. And finally, it is well known he enjoyed having sex with the dead. As I will describe later, sex with a corpse or part of a corpse became routine for Bundy. Yet in the end, we are left to speculate about this as well as other murders he is suspected of committing prior to his known launch into the world of serial murder.

We would not have to speculate, however, on what Bundy ultimately became. His decision to begin slaughtering women on a regular basis at the start of 1974 placed him on that proverbial road of no return. Once the killing started, Bundy would have only one true goal in life, and that was to fulfill his dark, necrophilic fantasies, where he believed the ultimate possession of a woman was found in watching her die. Only then could he finally fulfill that deviant desire of making love to someone freshly dead. A playground of necrophilia, the victim was now his ultimate sexual fantasy.

And so this brings me to the reason why I wrote this book.

Regrettably, it would take time for the world to discover the true nature of Theodore Robert Bundy, but once observed that nature would quickly birth a strange fascination with his carefully-crafted facade, and his inner world where the monster dwelled. After all, the Bundy the public was accustomed to seeing was a bright and handsome young man who appeared to have his feet firmly planted on the road to a successful future. A college graduate, a law student, and someone who was rising fast in the upper echelons of the Republican Party in Washington State, Bundy had the proverbial brass ring clutched tightly in his hands and there appeared to be no stopping him. He was loved deeply by his girlfriend of six years, Liz Kendall, who naturally believed that she, her daughter Tina, and Bundy were walking into a bright future together; a future where he had attained such a high degree of respect and acceptance among Seattle's professional community, that in whatever career he would eventually choose, be it politics or law, the proper doors were going to open for him. Outwardly, he had it all.

And it is here, at the intersection of normal Theodore Bundy and diabolical Theodore Bundy, that the mind of the average person begins to shortcircuit, for at this bizarre crossroads lies a troubling dichotomy which shouldn't exist, but does. At first glance he seems so similar to us in so many ways, and was seemingly everything a brother, a husband, a father, or an uncle should be. But on the inside, where the real Theodore Bundy lived, he was (or, more appropriately, he became) a vessel filled with evil, and one from which poured the most vile and wicked plans ever devised by a human being. It was a nature he carefully cultivated, was sorry to say goodbye to after his final arrest, and which followed him to his grave.

He was (and remains today) an enigma, with a dual nature that defies explanation; a bogeyman that settles over the mind which is difficult for most people to come to grips with. He is the stuff of nightmares, a malignant entity that was, for a brief period, all too real, and even in the two decades since his death, that power to make us shudder has not diminished.

Of course, with someone as strange and unique as Theodore Bundy (there is not, in my estimation, another killer quite like him in all the annals of murder) who had a killing spree throughout as many as six states involving from 36 to 50 women and young girls, it was a certainty the public would yearn to know all they could. And once the shock of being apprehended was past, Bundy immediately began playing to the press (and anyone else who cared to listen to him), as the wrongly accused, a martyr of sorts in search of justice. In this arena Bundy quickly learned to love the spotlight, and whenever he sought a platform to air his grievances, a reporter or a television station would be there to record the spectacle. He fully understood the public's (and the media's) fascination with him, and it is the kind of exposure which caused the world to take notice, giving Bundy an almost perverse notoriety, not just in this country, but around the globe, as witnessed by the international news crews who flocked to the state of Florida during his two trials for the murders committed there.

Here was a young man whose stage was now virtually the entire planet, standing accused of some of the most horrible crimes a human can commit, and yet he just didn't fit the mold. It wasn't that we as a society believed he was innocent; on the contrary, the evidence of his guilt was overwhelming. But how, we asked, could someone so seemingly normal do such horrible things? After all, shouldn't a monster look like a monster? On a personal note, I remember hearing of the recapture of the well-educated former law student after his first escape from Colorado, and how he was the main suspect in a number of cases of missing and murdered women from Washington State. "Hmm," I wondered. "How does a law student end up being accused of such things?"

But as we shall see, even a monster can wear a mask.