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Nelson Rockefeller had come to the Western States Republican Conference at Portland during the early days of October 1975, to make the customary plea for party unity and to praise the performance of President Gerald R. Ford. Ross Davis, the Washington State chairman, had traveled to Portland from Seattle with the hope he might orchestrate a little gesture of support for Rockefeller, whose own career was plainly on the wane, urging his fellow state chairmen, most of them conservatives, to support a praise-Rocky resolution. Davis’ effort foundered. When the meeting was over, I spotted Davis in the hotel lobby and began making my way through the crowd toward him. I wanted to needle him a bit.
But as I approached, I saw a peculiar look—half smile, half bewilderment—on Davis’ face.
“Dick,” he said, “I just got the damnedest telephone message from my office. You’ll never believe it.”
“What was it?”
“Well, we got word that the police down in Salt Lake City have arrested Ted Bundy.”
“Ted? You’re kidding!”
I remembered dealing with Ted during 1973, that year when he was Davis’ top assistant and attended practically all the statewide Republican events. Davis and I had talked often of Ted, speculating about his future in the world of politics.
“What in the world would Ted be arrested for?”
Davis’ face still held a half-smile, as though he expected the whole thing might yet turn out to be some bizarre joke—or at least a colossal police error.
“Kidnapping and attempted murder of a young girl.”
I laughed. “Aw, c’mon. There’s got to be some mistake.”
“No, I’m serious. They’ve got him in jail down there.”
Davis’ grin of puzzlement faded as he relayed more of the information he’d received. The police, he explained, were claiming that Ted had lured a girl into his car and then tried to kill her.
We stared at each other in silence, sharing a cold thought.
Ted ...
“Ted doesn’t drive a Volkswagen, does he?” I asked.
“Yes, he does,” Davis replied.
Ken Knuckolls, the Washington State Republican National Committeeman and a friend of Davis, arrived to join our conversation. “Ken,” said Davis, turning to him, “I think we may be having a little problem we need to talk over.”
I left them to discuss it and hurried to a telephone to call my newspaper. Within the newsroom of The Seattle Times, and in other newspaper, radio, and TV newsrooms from Salt Lake City to Seattle, there was a flurry of activity, triggered by that first brief wire story out of Utah about Ted’s arrest. In a region which had been shocked by the “Ted murders,” there was instant speculation over the arrest of a man named Ted who’d driven a Volkswagen and who’d lived in Seattle at the time of the crimes.
By telephone, Lane Smith, my city editor, filled me in on the latest wire-service reports out of Salt Lake City. Ted Bundy was in jail, under $100,000 bail, charged with attempting to kidnap and trying to kill a girl named Carol DaRonch in 1974. The girl had just picked Bundy out of a police lineup, and he had been booked into jail.
“Since you know Bundy,” the editor suggested, “why don’t you fly over to Salt Lake City and see what’s going on? Maybe you can talk to him.”
* * *
“Well, this whole thing’s just gotten absolutely ridiculous!” Attorney John O’Connell was almost shouting the words into a telephone receiver propped on his left shoulder. The tall, bearded defense lawyer leaned back in his chair behind the desk in his downtown Salt Lake City office.
“They’re making Ted out as one of the great mass murderers of all times!” O’Connell sounded both derisive and angry. As I sat across the desk from him, I had no idea who was on the other end of his conversation. On O’Connell’s desk, the latest editions of both the Salt Lake Tribune and The Deseret News had bold headlines about the “Kidnap Suspect,” with photographs of Ted. “The reporters,” O’Connell continued, “are just running wild.” The Salt Lake City news media was speculating about Ted’s connection with the Melissa Smith murder and the Debbie Kent disappearance, the Seattle media about Ted’s possible connection with all the “Ted” murders up there. The Seattle P-I had a summary headline: IS UTAH “TED” THE SEATTLE “TED”?
O’Connell, I had been told, was one of Salt Lake City’s most successful criminal defense lawyers—a man with a record of winning the big cases. His partner, Bruce Lubeck, and the Seattle attorney Marlin Vortman, a friend of Ted’s who’d also hurried to Salt Lake City following Ted’s arrest, were in the office with me, listening as O’Connell continued his tirade into the telephone.
O’Connell began to read into the receiver some of the lower paragraphs of a lengthy Deseret News article about Ted. Apparently, said O’Connell, a reporter interviewed the landlord at the apartment where Ted was living and that landlord had said, “The only unusual thing I ever noticed was a two-foot square chopping block he had, the kind you’d find in a meat market. And the way he used shiny metal meat hooks on the ceiling to hold up his pots and pans.”
“As though Ted were some sort of a mad butcher!” With an exclamation over the “chopping block” and “meat hooks,” O’Connell tossed the newspaper onto his desk and ended the phone conversation.
Apparently O’Connell viewed me with less hostility than he held toward other reporters. Helpfully, Vortman had introduced me as an acquaintance of Ted’s from Seattle.
“How’s Ted doing in jail?” I asked O’Connell. I assumed he was terrified.
Ted was doing as well as anyone could after being thrown into jail and suddenly, while an innocent person, being portrayed as some sort of a mass murderer, the lawyer replied.
O’Connell rose from his desk and prepared to leave the office with Lubeck and Vortman to go visit Ted in the nearby jail. “I’d really like to be able to talk with Ted if I could,” I said.
O’Connell frowned and said he doubted that would be possible. Under jail policy, Ted was only being allowed visits with his lawyers. Besides, said O’Connell, he didn’t want Ted generating any more publicity about the case. But, the lawyer hinted, I might later place a telephone call to the visitors’ room of the Salt Lake County jail, the place where they’d been having their meeting. Thus, by telephone, I might at least be able to say hello to Ted.
While I waited to make that telephone call, I considered how desperately frightened, how anguished Ted must feel at that moment—to be jailed in an unfamiliar city, to be jailed anywhere, facing an ominous criminal charge while everyone engaged in speculation about all those cruel murders. If I were in that situation, I thought, I’d be clawing the walls of the jail, screaming my innocence.
My telephone call into the interview room at the jail was surprisingly quick and successful. It was startling to hear Ted’s voice at the other end of the line, saying, “Hi, Dick, how are you?”
“Ted,” I exclaimed. I was almost breathless with concern about his plight. “How are you?”
“Well,” Ted responded calmly, “we’re just chuggin’ right along.”
There seemed to be an almost serene control—even a smile—in his voice.
In an instant of silence, I slowly swallowed what he’d said and the unusual way he’d said it: chuggin’ right along.
Where was that scream of innocence?
“Dick,” he added, “I’m not really sure what we can talk about. You realize that I really can’t comment on the charges that are pending.” He was precise and lawyerlike as he pointed out how his attorneys had forbidden him to discuss the case. I replied that I understood that. There’d be no questions relating to the charges, I assured him, but I wanted to know how he was feeling, how he was being treated, if he had any message to be delivered to his friends in Seattle.
He replied that his jail conditions were okay. Then he added, “One thing you can write is that I really appreciate the expressions of support and offers of help I’ve had from all my friends up in Seattle.”
For a moment I wondered how, locked away in jail, he could have received so many expressions of support. Perhaps Vortman, the Seattle attorney, had brought that assurance to him.
“One thing that concerns me,” Ted’s youthful voice continued, “is that the news media interest in me causes harassment of my family and friends.”
The ground rules he had set for our conversation limited the scope of my questioning. Soon our conversation ended. I wished him luck. He sounded self-assured as we said good-bye.
* * *
About a week later, after I’d returned to Seattle, I received from Ted an “open letter to the public,” which he asked be published in The Times. I took it to Smith, my city editor, who read it:
I address this letter to my many friends and acquaintances who have offered their prayers, concern and support in my behalf. When time permits, I shall do my best to reply personally to each of you. You are truly beautiful people. Your encouragement is the light at the end of the tunnel.
I think of you constantly. I think of our beautiful state and the incomparable loveliness of our Seattle, the breathtaking vistas, which are, for you, part of your daily life are, for me, mind-woven tapestries which color the gray walls. I envy you.
The law is a curious animal. To a law student it becomes highly abstract and impersonal. To a defendant, in my position, it offers incredible new perspectives. The excesses of the system are slight in comparison to the protections it affords each of us, defendant or not. I have great confidence in its ultimate product: Justice.
God bless you.—Ted Bundy
“If I were in his situation,” observed Smith, “I think I’d be screaming my head off that the cops made a mistake.”
As I reread Ted’s letter, I concluded it reminded me of some political speeches I’d occasionally heard from candidates or officeholders who were in trouble—a salute to the system, with the implicit message that he was innocent and would eventually be cleared. I had a brief fantasy about Ted—how, after all this publicity had made him a celebrity, after he’d proved his total innocence, he’d return home and run for high office.