The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History (23 page)

Ironically, as Bundy was quickly shifting gears in his quest to put distance between himself and Viewmont High, he had metaphorically brushed shoulders with a future victim. Susan Curtis, who like Debbie Kent had come to see the play with her parents that evening, would unfortunately enter Ted Bundy's sphere of murder again seven months later, and, like Debbie, with fatal consequences.

When the Viewmont kids took their last bow for the night, the crowd rose from its seats and slowly shuffled into the main lobby to greet friends and family, or continued to the parking lot, having called it a night. As Dean and Belva Kent waited for Debbie's return, they made the usual small talk and would naturally have kept a keen eye on the door, for the trip to pick up Blair wouldn't take very long. But Debbie was now far away and in the hands of a killer, and as the crowd dwindled the Kents were forced to walk to a friend's house nearby. Already concerned about what was causing their daughter's delay, the parents were not prepared for what awaited them in the parking lot. For sitting in the same place where Dean had parked it was the family car. "That was when we really panicked," Belva Kent told a reporter from the Deseret Morning News. "It was a terrible night, and from then on, it never stopped.""

The Kents had joined what was now becoming a very long list of people who would never be the same. Here, the nightmare begins and continues, changing in form only as one year passes into two and then three, but it never ends. As can be expected, the Kents' four children were deeply affected by the loss of their sister, and Dean and Belva would eventually divorce. The alcohol-related auto accident which took the life of twenty-six-year-old William Kent in 1984 was but one more stream leading out of that endless well of pain created on that terrible November night. As Dean Kent related to a reporter in December of 1989, "I certainly feel that he [Bundy] was the cancer that destroyed our family.""

With the exceedingly bold abduction of Debra Kent from a neighborhood high school in the rather unlikely community of Bountiful, all of Utah now understood they had a monster on their hands; a sadistic killer of young women who apparently was quite skilled at escaping detection. Since authorities had already discovered the battered body of Melissa Smith, and what appeared to be foul play in the disappearance of Laura Ann Aime on Halloween night, no one, at least not those in law enforcement, expected Debbie to be found alive, and it was looking more certain to the astute investigators that even the October 2 disappearance of Nancy Wilcox was a homicide as well. But like their frustrated fellow detectives in Washington State, they found that this killer was leaving no trace of himself at any of the crime scenes. Or so it seemed.

An early Saturday morning search by the Bountiful Police Department would find a handcuff key in the gravel just outside the school's main doors. Detective Ira Beal, who was already aware of the attack on the young woman at the Fashion Place Mall, where the abductor had left handcuffs dangling from her wrist, got in his car and headed south on 1-15 towards Murray.

The key the detective carried with him did open the evidence-bagged handcuffs, but that in and of itself didn't prove anything. It is not uncommon for one brand of handcuff key to fit another brand, be it civilian, military, or police-issue. One thing is certain, this particular make of hand restraints (Gerocal), was not what was hanging on the belts of Bountiful's finest, so Beal knew it didn't belong to any of his guys. Deep down, he felt there had to be a connection. But it would take nearly one year for Ira Beal to know how right he was.

On November 27, a young couple from Brigham Young University hiking in American Fork Canyon discovered the strangled remains of Laura Ann Aime. The nude body, lying face down, was located just off a hiking trail at the bottom of a slight hill, and only five hundred yards from the Timpanogos Cave Visitor's Center. A stocking (perhaps not Laura's), was wrapped tightly around her throat and according to an autopsy report, her tongue was protruding through her teeth and her face was badly swollen. Like all the others, her skull had been fractured by a blow or blows from a heavy object. Initially, authorities believed the body to be that of Debbie Kent, but that wild speculation was soon ruled out.

When Jim and Shirley Aime made that terrible drive from their home in Salem to the morgue at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, there may still have been at least a spark of hope left that their daughter was still out there somewhere, alive and happy, and the dental charts they brought with them would prove this. Just the day before they'd been told it probably wasn't Laura; the deceased appeared to be at least twenty-five, they were told, and was not as tall as their child.

Leaving his wife in a waiting area with a group of investigators, Jim Aime and Utah County Sheriff Mack Holly made the longest walk of Jim's life. Passing through the large metal doors, he was led to the slab supporting the body of his daughter. Because of her condition, however, he at first believed he was looking at a stranger. Yet before he could feel any sense of relief, he remembered the scarring on Laura's arm from a riding accident years before, when barbed wire had sliced deeply into her flesh. When the arm was uncovered, his eyes fell upon the silent and irrefutable proof that his daughter had in fact been found. Seized by an overwhelming flood of pain and agony, Jim let out a blood-curdling wail which stopped everyone dead in their tracks. Speaking of it later, Shirleen said: "I couldn't believe it had come from a human being."28 Years later, Jim mentioned to a friend as they drove by the spot where Laura was found, "My little baby was up there all by herself and there was nothing I could do to help her."29

Now that young Laura was beyond pain, that agony so common to the victim's family was born into the lives of the Aimes. It was anyone's guess just who would be next, and fear was slowly enveloping the community. In those days the term "serial killer" did not exist as a label for someone like Ted Bundy. Yet it was clearly understood by the people of Washington State and now Utah that someone in their midst was orchestrating the deaths of young females for the sole purpose of his twisted enjoyment. And herein lies the ultimate horror for the community at large. Joseph C. Fisher, in his excellent book Killer Among Us: Public Reactions to Serial Murder, describes the reaction of the community when a murderer is operating among them:

Initially, then, a serial killer at large awakens a number of elemental fears, chief among them the fear of personal mortality and particularly a cruel, capricious, untimely, and meaningless death. It evokes dominant fears of strangers, both those who live outside the community and those who live within it but whose actions are beyond understanding. Because of its repetitiveness, serial murder creates a sense of anticipatory dread and feelings of helplessness that one cannot alter what fate dictates. Fear out of proportion to the threat is therefore the product of an inability to comprehend the repetitive slaughter of innocents by a member of the community whose disguise is the normalcy of everyday life."

The mania Bundy created through eight months of murder in Washington State had the entire population on edge and looking over its shoulders long after the perpetrator had found a new killing ground. He had risen up to become a faceless bogeyman ready to strike at will whenever the slightest guard of the individual was let down. And while it was true he was a fiend, he was a mortal one, and the fear of him far outweighed his true abilities. Now that he was dishing out the same kind of horror in Utah, that same fearful demoralization was starting to get a foothold there as well.

Bundy took great pleasure in whatever firestorm of panic, fear, and dread the people of Salt Lake and beyond might be experiencing. He was a voracious reader about all his activities wherever they were reported, so it is highly unlikely he ever missed picking up a paper whenever the latest story came rolling off the press. Of particular interest would have been the follow-up reporting on the Debbie Kent abduction. That someone snatched a young teenage girl as she was leaving a high school play, in a family-oriented neighborhood hosting a family-oriented event, sent emotional shock waves throughout the close-knit community of Bountiful. It was the most unthinkable and unlikely thing to have occurred, yet it did, and the end result, at least for many, was near hysteria. And as reports began to surface that her abductor had actually been inside the auditorium where he could be seen by hundreds of people as he searched for a person to kill made it all the more horrific. The headline for the Deseret News for Tuesday, December 10, 1974, summed it up in one short sentence: "Unsolved crimes cloak Bountiful in fear."

Leading the article was the rather surprising admission by Bountiful Police Chief Dean O. Anderson: "For years I've been saying that Bountiful is a nice, safe place where you could walk the streets alone. Now I can't say that anymore."" Although, the abduction and murder of Debbie Kent didn't make Bountiful any less "nice," or even less "safe" in the general sense of things. It did mean that any parking lot, in any city, town or hamlet has the potential for danger to women (or anyone else, for that matter), if what society refers to as a "bad person" is lurking nearby. As a veteran police officer, Chief Anderson shouldn't have been aghast at the randomness of the attack, its unlikely location, or the end results. These things can and do happen, and cops above all people understand this.

With the obvious signs of a serial killer on the loose in the greater Salt Lake area, it behooved people to take a little extra precaution in dark parking lots and other troublesome situations that could turn deadly. Now that the Kent family had fallen victim to this yet-unknown killer, the lid of silence over the city was blown sky-high as police began being swamped with tips from the public - tips which, of necessity, had to be investigated.32 By their own admission, most of the calls added nothing to the investigation of the missing girl, and were in fact causing some officers to pull a grueling, 100hour work week. In addition, the frantic calls from distraught parents fearing for their daughters' safety kept the police phone lines ringing constantly.33

More constructively, church groups and civic organizations offered their time and energy, and an auto dealer contacted Chief Anderson and offered numerous off-road vehicles for any searching he wanted to do in the moun- tains.34 But despite the painstaking combing of the hills, valleys, and mountains of the Wasatch Front, no trace of Debbie was ever recovered.

As for Theodore Bundy, the threat to the female population of Bountiful was over; that is to say, there is no record of him ever attacking anyone else there, though he may have passed through it on occasion during his endless trolling for victims. However, the effects of what happened on November 8, 1974, linger in this rather small community even today. On the warm August afternoon in 2006 when I visited Viewmont High School as part of my research, the lobby and main office had a small but steady traffic of students and parents preparing for the new year. When I introduced myself and told them why I was there, they knew exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned Debbie Kent's name. While I was given permission to tour and photograph whatever I deemed important, there seemed to be some suspicion of my true intentions, and an almost reverent protection of the memory of Debbie Kent.

The past few months had not been easy for Elizabeth Kendall. Like a woman possessed of some terrible knowledge, each day she posed the same questions in her mind about the man she loved, and each night when she went to bed, nothing had been resolved. Perhaps she had moments, ever so briefly, when she thought that he was not a killer. She could never hold this belief for very long, however, before the tidal wave of doubts came crashing in on her, leaving her confused and in turmoil. It was a cycle from which she couldn't get away.

And then there were the events in Utah that October.

Liz's friend Angie had spent part of October visiting her family in Ogden, Utah. As she and her mother were driving to the airport for her return to Seattle, Angie later told Liz, a radio news report said that hunters had stumbled over the body of the daughter of Midvale Police Chief Louis Smith. "I don't want to scare you," she told Liz, "but it's happening in Utah right now."" With all the emotional upheaval Liz had had to deal with in the past few weeks concerning his guilt or innocence, this was the last thing she wanted to hear. Yet if he were the cold-blooded killer authorities were so desperately looking for, she was determined to help them.

The next morning, as her coworkers left the area for a break, she contacted the King County Police. Speaking with Detective Hergesheimer, Liz attempted to explain her situation, but it came out in a somewhat convoluted manner. She didn't identify him by name (at least not as yet), but she did speak of a friend from Seattle who had moved to Utah, and how, following his move, the murders ceased in Washington, and were now beginning in Utah. Although she said she didn't believe her friend was actually involved, it became clear the detective needed to know more.36

Naturally, Hergesheimer pressed her for a name, but Liz didn't want to tell him, and she may have started to feel a little overwhelmed at this point, as she acknowledged that he probably couldn't do very much for her without knowing who they were talking about. She said: "I know you can't do a lot without his name, but it's just that I'm probably wrong." "I understand," the detective responded. "It makes my job harder but not impossible. What are the coincidences you are worried about?"37

Having broken the ice, Liz told of Bundy's Volkswagen, the crutches she found in his room and perhaps the most important factor, the murders which stopped in Washington State when he left and started in Utah after he arrived. Hergesheimer listened intently, but to Liz, he didn't seem that excited by what she was saying. That was just the poker-voice of a seasoned cop who wasn't about to give anything away, especially to someone being as vague as this woman.