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There was a bounce in Ted’s stride, and he obviously felt chipper as we walked together in the sunshine up Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City.
After eight weeks in the Salt Lake County jail, he was finally free on bail. Ted’s freedom had come almost as a gift for his twenty-ninth birthday which was approaching November 24, 1975. His bond was posted November 20.
“Well, Ted, how does it feel to be out?” I asked.
“There’s just no way to discuss freedom, no way of understanding it, unless you’ve had it taken away from you,” said Ted solemnly. “Just the feeling I have now, the ability to walk where I want to walk, is indescribable.”
Ted explained he had been treated well in the Salt Lake County jail. “I learned that I can cope. I learned a lot. It’s just as though I’ve received an eight-week course, paid for by the county, in the criminal-justice system.”
He sounded as if he were a student who’d been doing research for a thesis. “I’ve learned a number of ways to improve the system.”
“Where would you start?” I asked.
“Well,” he grinned, “I’d start with changing the bail-bond system.”
We laughed together at that. There had been colossal snags in the raising and posting of his bond. The prosecution had played a tough game, resisting the lowering of his bail. Then, even after the bond had been lowered and his mother had secured a loan and wired the money to Utah, there had been further red-tape delays.
Now Ted was involved in some preliminary court hearings, during which a city-court judge considered whether or not there were grounds to bind him over for trial on charges of the attempted kidnapping and murder of Carol DaRonch. The hearings were closed to the public, but, after one closed-door session that day, Ted had buoyantly told reporters in the corridor, “I welcome a trial. I want to clear my name. I want it all out in the open. I want it aired.”
Those hearings were, in effect, a preview of the state’s case against him, and Ted said he’d wished they were open to the press. His lawyer, J0hn O’Connell, had successfully moved to have the sessions closed. “Some of the things in that trial will blow your mind,” Ted told me. He sounded confident that the prosecution’s circumstantial case against him would fall apart and that his defense had a solid attack on the procedures used by police in securing Carol DaRonch’s identification of him.
“Where do you want to have lunch?” I asked.
“Well, we can go up here to Lamb’s. It’s right up in the next block,” said Ted.
“Fine.”
As we walked along the busy street, Ted’s bright eyes were active. He studied the faces of passersby, took in the sights of the street, looked over displays in store windows. It seemed to me his hair was darker than I’d recalled. His skin was much paler, the result of his weeks in jail. He wore a checkered sport coat, slacks, and open-collared shirt.
“I’m pretty impressed by O’Connell,” I observed.
“Oh, yes. He’s a very effective lawyer. And Bruce Lubeck is very, very, bright, too. They make a good team.”
“You seem confident.”
“You bet. I’ve got every reason to be confident.”
We turned into the small, rather homey restaurant in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City. In a front booth, two young women looked up, smiled brightly, and greeted Ted. “Well, hi,” he replied. They were obviously friends from the university. I left Ted to talk with them and walked to the rear of the restaurant to find a table and to wait for him.
Ted stood at the booth in an animated conversation with the young women. To some of the students at the University of Utah, Ted Bundy had—through all the bizarre, speculative news stories, and the charges—attained almost folklore status, an example of a young person victimized by excess zeal of the system. Ted shared a hearty laugh with the girls. He was handling his celebrity status rather easily.
When Ted joined me at our table, I pushed a menu toward him. “Order whatever you want. I’m picking up the check.”
A matronly waitress in a blue nylon uniform arrived to take our order. “Well,” Ted told her pleasantly, “I’ll start with a double order of potato salad and a glass of milk. And while you bring that, I’ll study the menu.” She beamed at the handsome young man and hurried to get his potato salad.
While we talked through lunch, I also suggested to Ted that we have dinner that night. Ted seemed to be famished, and I knew he had little or no money. He agreed that dinner was a fine idea.
“We could go up to Park City,” Ted suggested. “There are a couple of good restaurants up there, and it’s pretty.” Park City was a historic old mining town in the Wasatch Mountains, which had been restored in recent years and turned into one of Utah’s more popular ski resorts.
“Sounds good,” I said. I had a rental car, a Gremlin, and I asked Ted if he’d like to borrow it that afternoon after our lunch.
“Sure,” Ted responded. “That’d be a help. I’ve got a lot of errands to run. I want to pick up some jeans. And I have to go to the law library.”
Our ground rules of conversation forbade my pumping him about the case, the evidence, the legal issues involved. But Ted seemed to want to talk about it.
“David Yocom is supposed to be a pretty good prosecutor,” said Ted. “But I think the state’s got real trouble with this case, and they know it.” He sounded confident, combative.
“When they brought me into that lineup,” Ted continued, “and the DaRonch girl identified me, I was the only one there who wasn’t a policeman. Every other man standing in that lineup was a police officer.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. All those other men standing there were police officers. When they walked out on that stage, into those lights, they could act really confident. And then I walk out there. I’m obviously different. Anyone in a situation like that is going to act nervous. So you appear different from all the others.
“And they’re all older than I am. I’m the one who looks like a college student. And Carol DaRonch was sitting out there in the audience. She’d been shown my photograph. She knew I’m a law student. She knew who she was looking for. And that’s their whole case. Her identification of me.”
I sighed. Ted, I thought, had grounds to contest the key element in the state’s case—Carol DaRonch’s identification.
When I lent Ted my Gremlin that afternoon, we agreed he would come by the Travelodge to pick me up around 5:30.
* * *
He was punctual. So, in the darkening late November afternoon, we left Salt Lake City on the Interstate highway, heading eastward, climbing upward in the mountains. “I love to drive,” said Ted, relaxing at the wheel. “It’s really restful, just having the countryside pass you by.”
Ted was an entertaining, informative tour guide. As he drove, he told me all about the Wasatch Front, the mountains, some of the history of Utah, some of the things to do around the Salt Lake City area. “I’ve really enjoyed it here,” he said, leaning back in the driver’s seat. “But I do miss Seattle. No doubt about that. And I miss my friends up there.” We reminisced about Seattle’s newest restaurants, the night life, and about mutual friends in the political world there.
“Y’know, Ted,” I told him, “I’ve always thought of you as a candidate for office one day. And a pretty good candidate, I’d guess. But now ...” I fumbled for words to describe his new situation. “What happens in your life now? How do you see your future?”
Ted was guiding the Gremlin through a gentle, sweeping leftward curve of the highway. He smiled and sighed and raised one fingertip to an arched eyebrow. “Well, I always had about three goals in my life,” Ted began. “One, to be married and have a family life. And, second, to become a lawyer. And then, maybe, to be in politics—to try to do something through the political system. Now, I guess, I can see they’re all out of the question.”
“Yes,” I sighed. “You may be right. But not necessarily. We don’t know what’ll come of all this.”
It was troubling to consider that such a young man, still innocent in my view, the victim of such outrageous circumstance and suspicion, could have his life ruined by such events. I had compassion for Ted. Yet I was puzzled by the rather mechanical way Ted had clicked off his life goals—one, two, three—as though his response had been rehearsed. Ted’s top priority goal in life, he had said, was marriage. I waited for him to volunteer some expression of tenderness and love for Cas, but he said nothing further.
Ted turned the subject to skiing. “Utah has some really fine places to ski,” he said.
“I gave up skiing,” I replied. “It’s getting to be just too damned expensive. It costs hundreds of dollars or so just to get outfitted nowadays, and the tow tickets are so high, I get a nosebleed before I reach the lift.”
Ted chuckled in agreement. He remembered the fun he used to have when he was “fourteen or so. I remember fixing up my own skis,” Ted recalled. “Old wood skis. You know, working on them, putting the base on them, waxing them. That was fun skiing. Up there on the hills, wearing my old blue jeans.” He smiled at the memory.
As a kid, that was the way I skied, too. And I hated it. On my heavy old, hand-me-down wooden skis, I remembered resenting the other skiers on the hills who could afford high-fashion ski clothing and their expensive new lightweight skis. I wondered if Ted might not have had some of the same resentments, but I kept the question to myself.
As we drove higher in the mountains, I thought about Melissa Smith. Whoever killed her must have traveled this highway to the point where her body was dumped at Summit Park, using a turnout which the Gremlin was passing on the right.
There was a sense of enormous latent energy within Ted, I thought. For a moment I noticed his hands on the steering wheel. They were rather slim hands, almost bony. Now they were a pale ivory color, the result of the jail time he’d served. But they were strong hands.
He was a poor driver. The Gremlin seemed to drift within the lane, slowly, from one stripe to the other and back again.
Darkness was falling as we approached Park City, driving past new condominium developments mushrooming at the outer edge of the development. Ted drove around the small town perched on its mountainside, to point out some of the old mining-camp buildings remaining from Park City’s boom days. Then he parked the Gremlin on the narrow, sloped little main street of the village. A few snowflakes were beginning to appear, floating in the cold, black night.
November was the off-season, so Park City’s ski slopes weren’t operating. As Ted and I began strolling along the sidewalk, past the restored fronts of a tavern, an antique shop, the other businesses, there was almost no one in sight. Suddenly I was aware that Ted wasn’t walking beside me.
“Aha!” The sound of his voice came from behind me. I turned.
Ted had stopped on the sidewalk and stood at the curb, admiring a Volkswagen parked there. “A Volkswagen!” he exclaimed. Ted reached out with one hand to pat its top, and turned his face toward me, smiling.
He seemed to have struck a pose just for me, a perfectly staged cameo I’d be able to photograph in my mind. Against a black night background, Ted, wavy haired, smiling, and a Volkswagen.
“I just love Volkswagens,” he laughed.
He held the pose for another long moment.
I didn’t know quite how to react. It was obvious he wanted my memory to be inscribed with the sight of and thought of Ted Bundy and a Volkswagen.
With a playful grin, he jauntily rejoined me as we resumed our stroll along the line of shops.
I suggested we step into the Purple Onion, a little art gallery. Ted shrugged and followed me. I browsed slowly, looking at some fair metal sculpture and wrinkling my nose at some mediocre oil paintings. They were Sunday artists’ work mostly—for the tourists. Ted seemed wrapped in a mood of boredom. I guessed he had little interest in galleries. I moved to an artist’s display which covered most of one wall. It was a grouping of unusual framed works of wood inlay. The pictures had been created by a Salt Lake City artist, who had meticulously cut, then fit together, pieces of wood of different species and colors, to create outdoor scenes, mostly Bambilike deer, forests, mountains, and streams. “I don’t think much of the art,” I murmured, peering closely at one, “but the craftsmanship’s good.”
Off to my left a few feet, Ted sounded suddenly interested.
“Aha,” he exclaimed. “Here’s one I really like!” Ted was examining one of the wood-inlay works I hadn’t yet reached. I moved to see what had caught his eye.
It was a picture of a bird’s nest in the crotch of a tall pine tree. In the nest, two innocent, frightened baby birds looked upward, where, wings spread, an evil-eyed hawk swooped toward them, its talons reaching to snatch up the babies.
Ted enthused: “I like that one!”
I stared at the picture. The hair of my neck prickled. I glanced over my shoulder. Ted stood, his arms folded across his chest, grinning broadly at the portrait of the predator.
He gave me a sly glance, obviously seeking some reaction.
The symbolism was so obvious, so precise. Ted was playing an enigmatic game with me, delivering a tantalizing hint of guilt.
I decided to finesse. “Let’s go have dinner,” I suggested.
* * *
Only one other table was occupied as we ordered prime ribs and baked potatoes in the rustic frontier dining room of the aged Claimjumper Hotel. I ordered a glass of burgundy. Ted preferred milk. We talked about all the publicity that had descended on Ted in recent weeks. His eyes kept moving around the mostly vacant room, seeming to expect that he would be recognized. But no one—neither the hostess, the waiter, nor the other people at the red cloth-covered tables—recognized him. He talked about the superficiality, the near-hysteria of reporters and their news coverage of him. Ted seemed to exclude me from guilt. I was, after all, a political writer, not a crime reporter. And he knew I was operating on a strong presumption of innocence.
Everywhere there is a missing girl, Ted mused, “someone’s now got to try to connect her disappearance with Ted Bundy.”
I nodded. I told him, “I remember telephoning John O’Connell the other day, and before I could even get out the first question, John shouted, ‘It’s a false, malicious rumor. Ted Bundy did not take Amelia Earhart.’”
Ted chuckled.
“Well, when this is all over and I’m exonerated,” Ted said matter-of-factly, “I’ll expect equal time and space for the stories of my innocence.”
Later, after dinner, as we drove in the darkness down the lonely highway from the mountains toward the lights of Salt Lake City below, Ted began talking about the cops.
“Y’know, they had this big meeting over at Aspen—of all the police from all over. And Captain Mackie, head of the King County investigation, stopped off here on his way home. And he wanted to interview me. I guess he expected me to confess everything in sight. Well, John O’Connell just laughed at him and sent him on his way.
“I don’t know how much in taxpayers’ money was wasted on that meeting with all those officers over there. Of course, one feels sorry for the families of all those poor, unfortunate victims. But as long as the police keep trying to hang every one of their unsolved crimes on me, as long as they keep their heads in the sand about me the way they are, there are going to be girls disappearing and turning up murdered all over the place.”
He continued to refer to the Washington State investigation. “They’re not going to find any evidence there,” he said emphatically, “because there’s no evidence there to find.”
I studied Ted’s profile, softly illuminated in the light of the dashboard. It was a good profile—the wavy hair, well-shaped nose, good chin. He had the good looks to be an actor. In what role? Perhaps, I thought, casting him, he’d be one of those handsome young good-guy cops on a television show.
Ted talked again about the police lineup procedures used in his case, plus the evidence that had been found in his car when the state patrol sergeant had arrested him the previous August. “They made a big thing out of the fact that I had a pair of handcuffs,” Ted snapped. “I don’t know what’s so unusual about that. Heck, I was in law enforcement. You know, I was with the Seattle crime commission. ...”
Ted’s trial was not imminent. He would be free on bond until after the holiday season. He was planning to revisit Seattle, he told me. (That experience was still ahead of him. He would discover that Seattle and King County police would trail him wherever he went. And Ted, recognizing them, would taunt them, hide from them, and, occasionally, walk up to the surveillance men and begin conversation with them. Sometimes he would playfully tail the men assigned to follow him.)
As the Gremlin entered Salt Lake City, I asked Ted if he had found any good nightlife in the city.
“Oh, sure,” he replied. “I’ve found some fun places. There’s a place over in Trolley Square that I’ve gone to a lot. I love to find a place with music where I can—y’know—get down and boogie.”
I told him that I had some work to do that night. So, assuming he might want to be able to get around and see his friends, I offered him the overnight use of the Gremlin.
“Sure, that’d be fine,” he replied.
Perhaps, I thought, it wasn’t very wise to be lending Ted my car, yet there was a quality about Ted which evoked a desire to help him. I knew he had little or no money, and he no longer had his apartment. Most of his possessions had been stored. He’d said he’d be spending the night at the home of Salt Lake City friends, where he’d toss a sleeping bag on the floor.
Ted let me out of the car at the Travelodge. I almost—but not quite—gave him a parting shot: “Ted, I’d just as soon not read in the morning paper that some girl mysteriously disappeared in a Gremlin. So watch it, okay?”
He probably would have enjoyed that kind of a needle. But I didn’t have the audacity to say it. Ted was better at game playing than I was.