The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

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. He is the center of the world. We are all paper doll figures who don’t matter. Under the law and medically, someone who is insane doesn’t know the difference and is not responsible for his actions, however shocking.

As I write these recollections of women who survived, I hope my readers are taking careful note of why they did. They screamed. They fought. They slammed doors in a stranger’s face. They ran. They doubted glib stories. They spotted flaws in those stories. They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them.

Dr. Hoshall was sitting next to one of Raiford Prison’s psychologists. “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.’”

What was Ted’s I.Q.? It was 124 on the Standard Wechsler-Bellevue. Enough to graduate from college, and obtain further degrees but he never tested at the genius level.

My contract to write this book was signed many months before Ted Bundy became the prime suspect in more than a dozen homicide cases.

When we did meet in 1971, I was a plumpish mother of four, almost thirty-five, nearing divorce. Ted was twenty-four, a brilliant, handsome senior in psychology at the University of Washington. Chance made us partners on the crisis lines at Seattle’s Crisis Clinic on the Tuesday night late shift. Rapport, an almost instant rapport, made us friends.

Looking back, we see it is often casual choices which chart a path to tragedy.

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.

He was handsome, although the years of adversity ahead would somehow see him become even handsomer, as if his features were being honed to a fine edge.

And Ted was physically strong, much stronger than I had thought when I saw him for the first time. He had seemed slender, almost frail, and I had made it a habit to bring cookies and sandwiches to share with him each Tuesday night. I thought he might not be getting enough to eat. I was surprised one warm night when he’d bicycled to the clinic wearing cut-off blue jeans. His legs were as thickly muscled and powerful as a professional athlete’s. He was slender, but he was whipcord tough.

Ted’s treatment of me was the kind of old-world gallantry that he invariably showed toward any woman I ever saw him with, and I found it appealing.

he was employed by the City of Seattle’s Crime Prevention Advisory Commission and was reviewing the state’s new hitchhiking law, a law which made thumbing a ride legal again. “Put me down as being absolutely against hitchhiking,” I said. “I’ve written too many stories about female homicide victims who met their killers while they were hitchhiking.”

He had not softened his position against riots, student insurrections, and anarchy. The law was right. The rest was violence.

Ted’s life was so carefully compartmentalized that he was able to be one person with one woman, and an entirely different man with another. He moved in many circles, and most of his friends and associates knew nothing of the other areas in his life.

In mid-February, Stephanie called Ted. She was angry and hurt, and she started to yell at him for dropping her without so much as an explanation. His voice was flat and calm, as he said, “Stephanie, I have no idea what you mean. …” Stephanie heard the phone click and the line went dead. At length, she concluded that Ted’s high-power courtship in the latter part of 1973 had been deliberately planned, that he had waited all those years to be in a position where he could make her fall in love with him, just so that he could drop her, reject her, as she had rejected him. In September 1974 she wrote to a friend: “I don’t know what happened. He changed so completely. I escaped by the skin of my teeth. When I think of his cold and calculating manner, I shudder.”

I was experiencing the kind of dread that soon every parent in the area would feel. As a crime writer, I had seen too much violence, too much tragedy, and I saw “suspicious men” wherever I went. I have never been afraid for myself. But for my daughters, oh yes, for my daughters. I warned them so much that they finally accused me of getting paranoid.

the theories of Dr. E. Locarde, a pioneer French criminalist who states, “Every criminal leaves something of himself at the scene of a crime—something, no matter how minute—and always takes something of the scene away with him.” Every good detective knows this. This is why they search so intensely at a crime scene for that small part of the perpetrator that he has left behind: a hair, a drop of blood, a thread, a button, a finger or palm print, a footprint, traces of semen, tool marks, or shell casings. And, in most instances, they find it.

Any of us who have raised children know, as John F. Kennedy once said, that “to have children is to give hostages to fate.”

A sexual psychopath, according to Dr. Jarvis, is not legally insane, and does know the difference between right and wrong. But he is driven to attack women. There is usually no deficiency in intelligence, no brain damage, or frank psychosis.

time to talk, we tossed back and forth possible evaluations of who “Ted” might be. He obviously had to be quite intelligent, attractive, and charming. None of the eight girls would have gone with a man who had not seemed safe, whose manner was not so urbane and ingratiating that their normal caution and all the warnings since childhood, would have been ignored. Even though force, and probably violence, came later, he must have, in most of the cases, gained their confidence in the beginning. It seemed likely that he was, or had recently been, a college student. He was apparently familiar with campuses and the way of life there.

coworkers deemed him something of a conman, a manipulator, and a man who talked as if he worked hard, but who actually produced little.

Psychiatrists were more inclined to believe that the killer was a man obsessed by a terrible compulsion, a compulsion that forced him to hunt down and kill the same type of woman, over, and over, and over again, that he could never be able to murder her enough times to find surcease.

ended that letter, “There is nothing in this life that is a complete tragedy—nothing— try to remember that.”

All I could do was keep writing to Ted. Whatever his crimes might have been, whatever hidden things might someday be revealed, he seemed to need someone.

In an attempt to sort out my feelings, to deal with that stress, I consulted a psychiatrist. I handed him the letters. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what my motivations really are. Part of me wonders if Ted Bundy is guilty, not only of the cases in Utah, but of the cases here in Washington. If that is true, then I can write the book I’ve contracted for and write it from a position that any author would envy. I want that, selfishly for my own career, and because it would mean financial independence. I could send my children to college, and we could move to a house that isn’t falling down around our ears.” He looked at me. “And?” “And, on the other side of it, the man is my friend. But am I supporting him emotionally, writing to him, because I just want to solve all those murders, because I owe something to my detective friends too? Am I, in essence, trying to trap him? Am I being unfair? Do I have the right to correspond with Ted when I have a niggling feeling that he might be guilty? Am I playing straight with him?” “Let me ask you a question,” he countered. “If Ted Bundy proves to be a murderer, if he is sent to prison for the rest of his life, what would you do? Would you stop writing to him? Would you drop him?” That answer was easy. “No! No, I would always write to him. If what the detectives believe is true, if he is guilty, then he needs someone. If he had that on his conscience…No, I would keep writing, keep in touch.” “Then that’s your answer. You’re ...

If he has committed these crimes, he is probably an exhibitionist, and one day he’ll want his story told. He senses that you would do that in a manner that would portray the whole man.”