Chapter One: Ted

A heavy overcast pressed low on Puget Sound, so that the mountain ranges—the Olympics to the west, the Cascades to the east—were shrouded from view of the city by a thick, misty February veil. Up from the waterfront, a mottled gray seagull soared past upper windows of Seattle’s hillside office buildings, on a silent flight above the hum of street traffic below and the sounds of the nearby harbor.

Abruptly, a brilliant white light bathed one seventh-floor room of the federal building, as television crews and newspaper and radio reporters readied themselves for a midmorning press conference in the office of the FBI.

“Ah, yes,” said a TV technician, peering at his light meter, “Ted Bundy goes national.”

Other hot lights were switched on. Reporters, opening notebooks, settled into their chairs as a silver-haired Federal Bureau of Investigation agent entered the room and took his place behind a cluster of microphones. John Reed, chief agent of the Seattle FBI office, began reading the official announcement being released across the nation at 10 A.M., local time.

“On this date, February 10, 1978,” the agent began, “Theodore Robert Bundy has been added to the list of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s ten most wanted fugitives. ... Bundy was a recent escapee from a jail in Colorado and is wanted for questioning in connection with thirty-six sexual slayings which began in California in 1969 and extended through the Pacific Northwest and into Utah and Colorado. ...”

If Theodore Robert Bundy were to be convicted of all the killings in which he is a suspect, the FBI was explaining that day, he would be “the most prolific mass murderer in American history.”

While the FBI man continued to read the prepared statement, my pen paused over the notepad in my lap, and I turned my attention to the newly issued “wanted flier”—the latest poster which would be thumbtacked on public bulletin boards across America, along with all the other ‘‘most wanted” felons.

“Interstate flight—Murder,” said the headline. Beneath the ten swirl-pattern splotches, which were Ted Bundy’s fingerprints, were the three photos of Ted’s face, or, rather, three of Ted’s faces: left profile—good browline, straight-sculptured nose, loose-knit cardigan on the shoulders, the earnest, scholarly face you’d associate with a college campus; then the full face—head cocked to the left and slightly downward, tousled hair, a stubble of beard, eyebrows arched roguishly over intense eyes (I recognized that one as the way he looked after his first escape and recapture); and the lower right photograph—full face, looking toward the right, dark turtleneck, long dark hair, a full beard, a flicker of mirth in the almost smoky eyes; a photo which could be that of a leading man in a Shakespeare festival playbill.

Wanted ... Age 31, born November 24, 1946 ... HEIGHT: 5’11” to 6’ ... WEIGHT: 145 to 175 pounds ... BUILD: Slender, athletic ... Caution: Bundy, a college educated physical fitness enthusiast with a prior history of escape, is being sought as a prison escapee after being convicted of kidnapping and while awaiting trial involving brutal sex slaying of woman at ski resort. He should be considered armed, dangerous and an escape risk.

After the FBI man had completed the routine announcement, reporters asked their questions:

With a shrug, Reed responded, “We’re just looking for him all over the place.” This very morning, he noted, there were news conferences like this one in Salt Lake City and Denver—cities in states where there had been many murdered and missing young women. Bundy, whose movements seemed to coincide with murders, had been major crime news in Washington, Utah, Colorado, and elsewhere in the West for months. Now, said the FBI spokesman, the “most wanted” flier on the man would go to police everywhere in the nation, to attain “maximum saturation.”

Reed was asked: What about the thirty-six murders of which Bundy is suspected? Could the FBI detail them? Where and when—and how—did all those crimes occur?

He could only respond to that by saying that the FBI received that information from local police jurisdictions in the Western states. The FBI knew little about Bundy, other than that he had become an interstate fugitive when, forty-three days earlier, he had slipped out of jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, leaving behind a mound of law books and other items under a blanket on his jail-cell cot, and vanished in a snowstorm.

Local police in Colorado and elsewhere had pleaded with the FBI to put Bundy on the most-wanted list. That would assure a police alert across America, even though there would be no news-media interest in the man in such distant places as, for example, Florida.

As the news conference ended, TV crews dismantled lights, folded tripods, packed their gear, and headed back to studios to edit film and prepare it for the evening newscasts. Newspaper and radio reporters departed for telephones and newsroom typewriters. It would be the day’s lead story: Ted Bundy on FBI’s Most-Wanted List.

Hearing, reading that day’s news would be scores of people who knew Ted Bundy in earlier years—as a friend, a college classmate, as a work associate, as that rather good-looking young man whom they had encountered somewhere, one day, by chance—people who would attempt to reconcile their own memory of him with the always darkening news reports which suggested that wherever Ted Bundy seemed to travel, young women vanished and were murdered.

For Mary Ellen McCaffree, a pleasant, middle-aged Seattle woman, an activist in Washington State politics and government, memories of Ted Bundy were vivid.

Often, when she had been at home, working in her yard, tending flowers or trimming the lawn, there’d be a honk from a passing Volkswagen, and Ted would wave and shout, “Hi, Mary Ellen.”

“Ted, of course, was a very friendly person. And he lived right there in the neighborhood.”

That was in North Seattle’s University District, an attractive area of tree-lined streets, where distinguished older houses, most containing student apartments, were interspersed with fraternity and sorority houses. To the south, across 45th Street, was the woodsy edge of the large campus of the University of Washington where, in 1972, Bundy had received his bachelor’s degree in psychology. Even after graduation, he kept residence in a student apartment there in the “U District”; he seemed to enjoy the university atmosphere.

It was the year of Bundy’s graduation that Ken and Mary Ellen McCaffree came to know the young man well. Mrs. McCaffree, onetime member of the Washington State legislature, became a key organizer in the ’72 reelection campaign of Washington’s Governor Dan Evans. Because Evans was a liberal Republican, a champion of environmental protection and other “citizen causes,” legions of intensely loyal, bright young “Evans Republicans” turned out to help in his campaign.

Sometimes, after a session of work in campaign headquarters or of putting up yard signs, some of them would gather at the McCaffree home, to sit and talk and laugh in the comfortable living room. Often Ted Bundy was there.

The young man in turtleneck sweater, jeans, and tennis shoes confided that his dream was to go through law school. “But money’s a real problem,” he added. He talked excitedly of his new interest in the exhilarating world of politics—perhaps a career in politics.

“Well, Ted,” she replied, “I always tell all the kids I know—the ones that get interested in politics early—that the most important thing is to get your education first. Ted, I really think you should get your law degree.”

Jim Moore recalls first meeting Bundy during Moore’s unsuccessful 1972 campaign for the nonpartisan office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Mandatory school busing to attain racial desegregation had erupted early that year as a major issue in the Florida presidential-primary election and had spread as a hot issue into other campaigns across America.

That evening in October, Moore, a tall, mostly bald, bespectacled psychologist for the Seattle school system, delivered his antibusing speech to a candidate’s forum at Lincoln High School. Afterward, some of the candidates mixed with the crowd in the auditorium, and a well-dressed young man approached Moore to talk about the issue.

“Watch it,” Moore’s campaign manager told him. “The guy’s taping you.” The young man held a partially hidden tape recorder. “It’s okay,” said Moore.

Moore’s interviewer introduced himself as Ted Bundy, a campaign worker for Governor Dan Evans. He said he was researching issues. “He was a very sharp young chap,” Moore would reflect later. “Nice-looking young man.”

Moore had grown up in the distant small town of Lake City, Florida, where his closest boyhood friend, H. Morris Williams, also had gone into the field of education in their hometown. On that day, February 10, 1978, when Moore saw the news that Ted Bundy was on the list of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives, Moore’s boyhood friend Williams, principal of the Lake City, Florida, junior high school, was fearful about a pretty dark-haired schoolgirl who had vanished mysteriously from his school the day before.

In the predawn of that morning—a few hours before the FBI press conference in Seattle—Morris Williams had been roused out of his bed at his Lake City home by a distraught mother and father. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Leach were begging him to go with them to the junior high school and search for their daughter, Kimberly.

It was rather ironic, Cathy Swindler remembered with a chuckle, how Ted first seemed to her “sort of Kennedylike.” There was a little personal-political irony in that.

During 1968, that year of turbulence and frustration for America, agonizing over the war in Vietnam and social upheaval at home, Cathy was an early, avid supporter of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in his campaign for the Presidency. Then came his shocking assassination in California, and Cathy was disconsolate. An acquaintance at Western Washington State College, where she was a student, persuaded Cathy to go to work for what her friend described as “the next best candidate available”: Nelson Rockefeller of New York.

Although Rockefeller was a Republican, and Cathy was a loyal Democrat, she volunteered to work in the Draft Rockefeller headquarters in downtown Seattle. The office manager welcomed her with a cordial greeting: “Hi, I’m Ted Bundy. Welcome to the Rockefeller campaign.” He was quite handsome, and Cathy, a pretty nineteen-year-old with long honey-brown hair, was impressed by her new supervisor.

“He was very well dressed and well mannered,” Cathy recalled. “The kind of guy a girl my age would look at and just say wow! Sort of Kennedylike.”

Day by day, as she performed her routine work—typing, sorting file cards, handling telephone calls and other campaign chores—Cathy also watched and admired the efficient, obviously confident young man. “Ted had control of what he was doing. He was really poised. He was friendly. He was always smiling.” Ted had a way of letting volunteers know their work was appreciated. “He was terribly charismatic. Obviously, he was someone who had a great deal of compassion in dealing with other people.”

Then came that exciting moment when Ted approached Cathy’s desk and asked, “Would you like to walk with me up to the public market for lunch?”

“I almost fell all over myself,” she remembered. She accepted, of course, with as much composure as she could summon. That noontime, in the bright sunshine, the two of them—the suave, twenty-one-year-old man and the shining-faced younger woman—walked together, chatting happily, along the busy downtown street, northward to Seattle’s Pike Place market, a quaint arcade of farm-fresh fruit and vegetable stands, fish markets, crafts shops, and tucked-away eating places.

“What and what?” Cathy laughed. Slightly embarrassed, she admitted she had never heard of bagels. Ted patiently explained that, while bagels and cream cheese might be unfamiliar to a native of Seattle, it was a common order, especially in the East. “Try it,” he suggested.

Cathy and Ted took their bagels, wrapped in napkins, to a place behind the market, where they could sit and look down on Seattle’s waterfront. The warm breeze ruffled their hair, and Cathy listened, fascinated, as Ted talked about his studies at the University of Washington, his interest in the law and politics and people. Cathy felt flattered that he treated her so equally, even though she felt very little-girllike in the presence of a young man of such urbanity.

“He was a champion of causes. He was concerned about the situation of the blacks, of all minorities. And the poor,” she remembered. “He was unhappy with the injustices of society, and he wanted to do something about them.”

After their first lunch together, there were other dates. Sometimes they went to a movie, sometimes they just had coffee and conversation.

Once Ted invited Cathy to his apartment in the University District to play chess. “I don’t know how to play chess,” she replied. “It’s okay, I’ll teach you,” he offered. Ted’s grin was encouraging and irresistible.

Cathy arrived at Ted’s upstairs apartment a little early that afternoon and, because he wasn’t home, she waited at the doorway until he appeared. Ted soon came bounding up the stairs, wearing his tennis garb—white shorts, white tennis shirt, socks, and shoes. He just looks healthier’n hell, Cathy thought.

“Hi, sorry to be late,” Ted said, tucking his tennis racket under one arm and unlocking the apartment door. “Come on in.”

Ted’s small student bachelor apartment was tidy, with a neat arrangement of books and an orderly study desk. It was a warm summer day, and so the bed, in its folded-down position, was covered only by a white sheet. Ted opened the chessboard on the bed, and they sat down together, Ted arranging the chessmen and explaining the procedures of chess to her.

During the game, when Cathy began to move a pawn, Ted warned her softly, “Look at it, now. Look at it. Think about it.” It was a gentle warning that the move she was about to make would put her in some trouble.

Cathy withdrew her fingers from the pawn and looked up at him in wonderment. He merely grinned back at her. “Think about it now,” he encouraged. Ted made it clear she would have to think to contemplate each move until she understood what it might incur. Ted was an excellent chess coach.

Eventually their relationship progressed to the stage of an occasional embrace and kiss. If Ted’s touching became too intimate, Cathy needed only to touch his hand, and the hand withdrew. “He was always just the perfect gentleman,” she remembered.

Later that summer of ’68, Ted went off to Florida to attend the Republican National Convention, to continue his work in the Rockefeller cause. That was a losing effort. Richard Nixon in 1968 swept to an easy nomination, en route to the Presidency. But Ted that year had discovered the world of politics and campaigning.

Years later, Cathy and her father thought back and tried to remember if, during the time she and Ted were dating, she ever introduced Ted to her dad. “I think I must have,” Cathy said. Her father, Herb Swindler, confessed, “You know, I just can’t remember for certain if I ever did meet him. But you know I’d sure like to be able to meet him and talk to him now.”

Herb Swindler became chief of the homicide division of the Seattle Police Department in 1974, the year in which the series of murders of young women stunned the city.

Even after all the hundreds of news reports about Ted Bundy’s possible connection with so many murders of young women across the nation, Cathy could only reflect on the Ted she had known:

Ted Bundy was a figure that people met and loved. I mean, I thought I loved Ted Bundy. Not totally in a romantic way ... but in terms of being moved by what he said and his feelings for other human beings ... if you know him, you can’t help but have a great deal of affection for him as a human being.

During the final weeks of the 1972 campaign for governor of Washington State, a tough political battle was being fought by Governor Evans, the Republican, and Democrat Albert D. Rosellini. Wherever Rosellini appeared, newsmen noticed the handsome, well-groomed young man who seemed always to be in the audience.

Eventually, when I asked him who he was, the young man introduced himself as Ted Bundy, a graduate student at the University of Washington. He said he was working on a political-science thesis.

One day, late in the campaign, both candidates were scheduled to address senior citizens at the Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle—Rosellini at ten o’clock, Evans at eleven o’clock.

When I settled into my chair that morning, I noticed Bundy sitting a few rows in front of me. His tape recorder was beside him, and he took notes as Rosellini delivered his speech.

I stared at Bundy’s back, feeling envy. His long brown hair fell in perfect waves over his ears. There was a special dapperness about him.

Shortly after 10:30, Rosellini wound up his speech and left the room. After a moment Bundy rose and started toward the ornate lobby of the old hotel. I followed. Within moments Governor Evans and a small entourage came through the main doorway of the hotel and crossed to where Bundy stood.

The governor, a slender, dark-haired man, graying at the temples, greeted Bundy with a grin and leaned his head forward to listen. Bundy, referring to notes he’d taken during Rosellini’s speech, quickly briefed Governor Evans: “And he used the usual line about an eight percent cut in employees, across the board, in all state agencies.”

The governor listened, nodding, his eyes turned toward the mezzanine room where the audience awaited.

For Dan Evans, 1972 was an uncertain campaign year. President Richard Nixon was clearly on his way to a sweeping reelection victory over Democrat George McGovern. Evans, although a Republican like Nixon, couldn’t count on much “coattailing” help from the President. On many issues, Evans had disassociated himself from Nixon. But the most troubling factor in Evans’ reelection bid was the state economy, still ailing from the layoff in recent years of tens of thousands of Boeing Company aircraft employees.

Some Evans-Rosellini debates proved to be decisive near the end of the campaign. Rosellini fared poorly. In November ’72 Evans won his third term. Bundy, who’d played a role and won some influential friendships in the campaign, got a postelection job as an aide to Ross Davis, chairman of the Washington State Republican Party.

Months after the election, United Press International carried a report from the state capitol at Olympia, quoting Bundy as admitting he had posed as a college student to travel with and secretly report on the Rosellini campaign. “Theodore Bundy, now special assistant to State Republican Chairman Ross Davis, said in an interview that his connection with the Evans campaign was kept secret while he traveled with Rosellini,” said the report.

Gordon Schultz, state capital bureau chief for UPI, explained that he had noticed Bundy constantly shadowing Rosellini during the campaign, carrying his tape recorder, asking questions. When Schultz questioned Bundy about it at the time, Bundy explained, as he had to me, that he was a graduate student working on a political-science thesis. Later, when Bundy turned up as a paid staff employee of the state Republican Party, Schultz got Bundy to confess that his campaign story about being a student was a ruse.

Republicans were furious at the report, calling it a distortion. Democrats charged that Evans’ “spy” had been unethically seeking to dig up dirt on Rosellini.

I telephoned Bundy at the state GOP headquarters, and he happily agreed to come in to The Seattle Times newsroom for an interview. “Heck, yes,” he said. “I want to talk about it. I’m not apologetic for anything we did in the campaign.”

Ted arrived at the newsroom, again looking like the prosperous young executive-to-be, in a blue-gray jacket, slacks, shirt, and dark tie.

“Hi, Ted, nice to see you,” I said as we shook hands. We moved past the reporters’ desks and clacking typewriters to a partitioned interview room.

“Is it okay if I ask a photographer to come in and take some shots of you while we talk?”

“Certainly.” Ted sat at a table in the small room. “Y’know,” he explained, referring to the UPI article, “that really hurt. I’m not the least bit uncomfortable about what we did in that campaign. You know—you were there. You saw. We were just reporting everything Rosellini was saying and doing—the kind of things that a good campaign ought to do.”

I nodded in agreement. A few years earlier, I told him, I was involved in a congressional campaign, and we tried to find out everything we could about what the opponent was saying.

A photographer arrived as we discussed the campaign and some of the new issues involving Governor Evans and the legislature. We talked derisively about some of the old-guard Democrats who were running the state senate. “What a sad bunch,” Ted said with a grin. The photographer’s strobe flashed a few times. His smiling face was recorded. A very good face, I thought. Although I knew little about him, I was intrigued, as a political reporter, by any new appealing face in the political crowd. Bundy seemed articulate and self-confident.

“Well, I’ve given that some thought.” (I sensed he was flattered by that question—always an ego-inflator—and was handling the response like a skillful pro.) “Maybe some day. Right now I’m planning to go into law school this fall. Down at the University of Puget Sound [in Tacoma]. And maybe, eventually—who knows? I really do enjoy politics, and I think a lot of things can be done through the political system.”

I felt another twinge of envy. This twenty-five-year-old was obviously bright and had a promising future.

At interview’s end, we shook hands. “Well, Ted, good luck in law school.” I’d be writing an article which would dispute the “dirty tricks’’ allegation, I told him. (In fact, I eventually wrote that Ted Bundy was ‘‘a man who has become an accidental celebrity as, thanks to Watergate, the press and public discover with fascination some wholly proper kinds of activities which occur in political campaigns.”)

Of course, Ted had fibbed a little—unnecessarily, really—saying he was a graduate student, when, in fact, he was being paid by the Evans’ campaign. But fibs aren’t rare in politics.

We agreed to stay in touch. Only casually, I watched Ted walk away through the busy, fluorescent-lit newsroom.

Later I’d try to remember that moment—his hair color, size, and height. My memory was that he was rather wiry and not very tall, perhaps 5 feet 9 or 5 feet 10, and had brown hair with golden or sandy highlights.

There would eventually be varying recollections, especially about the hair color and height, when witnesses later tried to describe the man who was thought to be the killer.