The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

Those myriad potential victims who barely escaped from him with their lives are between fifty and sixty today. No one will ever know just how many there were.

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.

When he got to the porch, he turned around and looked back at us. “I will never forget those eyes and that stare as long as I live.

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

They ran. They doubted glib stories. They spotted flaws in those stories. They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them.

“I asked him if there was any effective treatment for people like Bundy. “He paused for a moment and said, ‘Only a sledgehammer between the eyes.’”

“I was eye-to-eye with one of the most heinous sexual predators of our time. My eyes were channeled with his right eye and I saw feral fear in his disheveled face—but no tears.

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!

And that brings us to the most omnipresent question of all: What was Ted Bundy really like? I don’t know.

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.

what an incredible book.

He promised himself that he would never get so much as a jaywalking ticket, nothing whatsoever that would cause law enforcement officers to ever glance his way. He was now a man without any past at all. Ted Bundy was dead.

Dearest V., The sweetness of the spring time rain runs down the window pain [sic.] (I can’t help it. It just flows out) Theodore Robert Bundy Peot [sic]

the circumstances that made Ted and me partners were purely coincidental. I have pondered on that coincidence in the years since, wondered why I should have been the one out of fifty-one to spend so much time with Ted Bundy.

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.

And so, when the quiet nights came, the nights when the moon was no longer full, when the welfare money had run out with no money left to buy liquor, and when the street people and the callers seemed to be enjoying a spate of serenity, Ted and I talked for hours to each other.

He was one of those rare people who listen with full attention, who evince a genuine caring by their very stance. You could tell things to Ted that you might never tell anyone else.

“Once in a while. We talk on the phone. Every time I hear her voice, it all comes back.

And then I think about Stephanie, and the life I could have with her. I want that too. I’ve never been rich, and I want to be. But how can I say ‘thanks a lot and goodbye’ to Meg?”

He always insisted on seeing me safely to my car when my shift at the Crisis Clinic was over in the wee hours of the morning. He stood by until I was safely inside my car, doors locked and engine started, waving to me as I headed for home twenty miles away. He often told me, “Be careful. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

After a year and a half, I had heard the same problems too many times. I had problems of my own.

it is a fantasy that helps to relieve the pain of rejection.

I escaped by the skin of my teeth. When I think of his cold and calculating manner, I shudder.”

Something—she couldn’t even say what—had caused the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end, something about that missing seat.

It was almost as if it was some kind of perverse game of challenge on the part of the abductor. As if, each time, he would come a little further out of the shadows

“It was a scream that wakened me. It was a high-pitched scream … a terrified scream. And then it just stopped, and everything was quiet. I figured it was just kids horsing around, but now I wish … I wish I’d …”

If I had been allowed to talk to Ted during those first days after his arrest in Pensacola, would things have been any different? Would there now be more answers? Or would I have flown to Florida only to be met with the same evasive, meandering statements that Ted gave to the detectives? I will never know.