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Caryn Campbell’s brother Bob would well remember that evening in Dearborn and the small dinner party at Caryn’s apartment. It was January 10, 1975—the last time he ever saw her, less than forty-eight hours before her murder.
“Gee I did the dumbest thing today,” Caryn had confessed with a laugh to her brother and the other guests that night. She described how, in a burst of housecleaning zeal, she had removed the six smoked-glass chimneys from the chandelier in her dining area and put them in the dishwasher.
“I was going to make them extra sparkly clean. And look at them.” She gestured toward the overhead lights. “Most of the tint came off.”
Her brother examined the cylinders of glass. The heat from the dishwasher had melted the plastic coating which had created the smoke tint. Now the glasses were a mottled mess, partly smoky, partly clear.
“Well, Caryn,” he teased, “as I remember, that’s about as clean as you ever got the glasses when you washed dishes at home.”
“Aw, be quiet, you rat,” she laughed.
It had always been natural for Bob to tease Caryn. She was the baby of the Campbell family—a good-natured, cheerful, energetic girl. Her brother would never acknowledge it verbally, but as he watched Caryn hovering over the table, serving the dinner that evening, Bob reflected what a beautiful young woman she was. Caryn, twenty-three, had an appealing, animated face, sparkling brown eyes, and long brown hair which fell onto her shoulders.
Bob hadn’t seen Caryn or other members of his family for a year, not since he had moved from Michigan to Florida, to his new job as an officer on the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. He had saved three weeks of vacation for this early January trip home to Dearborn.
“Well, Bob, how do you like being a policeman?” asked Caryn.
“Really good,” he replied. “I like Fort Lauderdale a lot. But, after Michigan, that Florida climate takes a little getting used to.”
Caryn was conspicuously proud of her brother. So was the whole family. Bob made a good-looking officer, they all thought—a tall, slender young man, with dark good looks.
Bob felt especially pleased watching Caryn and Ray Gadowski together. She and her handsome young physician boyfriend were obviously in love. Caryn, reflected Bob, seemed to be in the most promising phase of her life. Caryn had confided to the family that she and Ray planned to be married, perhaps that spring. Everyone approved, especially Bob. Caryn’s brother thought that Ray was a mature man, with an excellent career, who seemed very caring and considerate with Caryn—a man who could give Caryn a good life.
The dinner conversation turned to Caryn and Ray’s planned trip to Colorado, to a ski resort near Aspen. Ray explained he would be attending a cardiovascular seminar for physicians there, a combination of profession and pleasure.
“While Ray’s at his meetings, the kids and I can go skiing and pal around together,” Caryn added brightly. Ray, recently divorced, had two children—twelve-year-old Gregory and nine-year-old Jennifer.
“Sounds like a pretty nice trip,” said Bob. “When do you leave?”
“We’ll have to get away early tomorrow morning,” Ray replied.
“And I’m still not packed,” Caryn sighed.
After dinner had ended, as they said their good nights, Bob told Caryn, “Now don’t go breaking a leg skiing. Nurses aren’t supposed to be hobbling around on crutches.”
* * *
January 12, in her final hours of life, Caryn was skiing with Ray’s children on a dazzling bright expanse of snowfield in Colorado’s high Rockies. She absorbed the beauty around her—the brilliant blue of the sky behind the craggy mountain peaks above, and below, the snow-frosted village of Snowmass and the lodge, the Wildwood Inn, perched on the mountainside.
Caryn stayed close to Jenny, who frequently tangled her skis and fell in the snow. Patiently, Caryn had helped the little girl up, laughed with her, and steadied her for another try. By early afternoon, Caryn and the kids were becoming weary, so Caryn suggested, “Let’s go down and see your dad.”
They made their final run down the gentle slope, unhooked bindings, removed their skis and returned to the Wildwood Inn. The midwinter sun vanished abruptly, and the deepening blue-gray shadows fell quickly down from Elk Mountain, to envelop the lodge and the rest of Snowmass basin in darkness. By five o’clock a long cold night had begun, and Caryn’s life was nearly ended.
They had an early dinner together—Ray, Caryn, the children, and a physician friend from Michigan, Dr. Brian Sternoff—at the little Stew Pot restaurant in the village immediately below the lodge. Caryn drank a glass of milk, but didn’t quite finish her beef stew because, she said, her stomach felt slightly queasy. It was shortly after six o’clock. They finished their meal and left the restaurant.
Stepping outdoors, they all felt a sharpened bite of cold in the night air. As they turned uphill toward the lodge, Caryn snuggled into the warmth of her new sheepskin jacket. “Brrrr,” she said, putting an arm around Jenny. “It’s really getting cold.”
The five of them paused and entered the village drugstore to browse for a while. Ray and the children went to a display of toys and games. Caryn and Sternoff stood at the magazine rack where they leafed through some of the photo mags. Sternoff opened a Playboy foldout and chuckled in admiration. “I think I’ll buy this one,” he said.
“No, wait,” countered Caryn. “I’ve got that magazine up in the room. Why don’t you buy a Viva? And then I’ll trade you for the Playboy in the room.”
Sternoff agreed. He selected the Viva and paid the young woman clerk at the cash register. They left the drugstore and strolled uphill the few more steps toward the Wildwood Inn, past the rock pillars of the entryway and into the small lobby.
“Do you want to go up to the room and get the magazine?” Caryn asked Ray.
“No, why don’t you go get it,” he answered. “I’ll wait here in front of the fireplace with the kids.” He handed Caryn the key to their room, 210.
Caryn walked past the front desk toward the elevator door. When Jenny and Greg began to follow, she paused and, with a trace of impatience, shooed them back. “You guys stay here with your dad, okay? I’ll only be a minute.”
She entered the elevator alone. The door closed behind her.
On the level above, the Wildwood Inn’s heated outdoor swimming pool, surrounded by wings of the sprawling lodge, emitted a glowing cloud of steam in the night air. A few swimmers were soaking in the warm water. It was aprés ski—that special early evening hour for cordiality, relaxation, a sauna, a soak in the pool, or conversation over a cocktail. Groups of people moved noisily along the outdoor wooden walkways and steps interconnecting the rooms, wings, and levels of the lodge. On the walkway of the second level a party of doctors and wives talked and laughed as they headed toward a cocktail party.
Just as they reached the elevator at the second level, the door opened, and Caryn stepped out.
“Hello there,” said Ina Yoder, a physician’s wife who recognized Caryn.
“Hi,” Caryn replied with a smile.
“Are you going to the cocktail party?”
“No, we’re not planning to. I’m just on my way to the room to pick up something,” Caryn said. “Maybe we’ll see you later. Bye.”
The others walked on toward the cocktail party. Caryn turned from the elevator door and started in the direction of Room 210. To Caryn’s left, slightly below the walkway, in the blackness, was the glow from the pool.
From the elevator door, Room 210 was about twenty dimly-lighted steps along that open walkway.
There, on January 12, 1975, Caryn disappeared.
* * *
Waiting in the lobby, Ray Gadowski had settled into a comfortable chair, glancing through a magazine, in front of the rock fireplace; Sternoff had strolled up to a small mezzanine area, just off the lobby, into a TV-viewing lounge.
When more than a half hour elapsed and Caryn hadn’t returned, Ray went to Room 210, looking for her. He discovered to his puzzlement that she had apparently never reached the room. Caryn’s purse and the magazine she had gone to retrieve were still there. He looked for her around the lodge and searched village shops, then with rising fear, finally telephoned the local sheriff’s office for help.
After they arrived, the two Pitkin County deputy sheriffs took a sketchy report and, with Ray’s assistance, began a search in the numbing cold night.
Next day, Detective Sergeant Bill Baldridge called in Michael J. Fisher, investigator for the local district attorney’s office. Every room of the lodge had been checked, as many people as possible had been questioned, but there was no sign of Caryn, Baldridge told Fisher.
“I don’t like it at all,” said Baldridge as the two men retraced the steps Caryn had taken, walking toward Room 210. Gesturing toward the other wooden walkways fronting on the wings of the lodge, Baldridge explained, “There were people all over the place at that time of the evening. But no one saw or heard anything unusual.”
Fisher, a skilled investigator, didn’t enter a routine police case unless there was some sign that a major crime might have occurred. “I don’t like this one at all,” he muttered. “It doesn’t smell right.”
The two men paused on the wooden walkway outside Room 210. “Something must have happened right along here,” observed Fisher. “She must have met someone here on this walkway.”
“If she went off with somebody ...”
Fisher’s eyes followed the walkway to the end of that wing of the lodge. There, some stairs led downward to a roadway and, beyond, the lodge’s parking lot. Silently Fisher wondered if that “someone’’ had somehow gotten the girl to walk willingly to the parking lot.
Beginning with Dr. Gadowski and Dr. Sternoff, the detectives began a night-and-day questioning of all the guests of the Wildwood Inn, none of whom could shed light on the disappearance.
Some of the guests had checked out before they could be questioned noted Fisher. “We’ll have to catch up to them later on,” he grumbled, “but they’re gonna be scattered all the way from Hawaii to Maine.”
When Caryn’s frantic fiancé telephoned her family in Michigan, to break the news that she had vanished, Caryn’s brother decided to fly to Aspen to join in the search. After his arrival, the distressed Bob Campbell pumped Fisher for information about his sister’s disappearance. “What does it look like?” he asked.
“Not good, Bob, not good at all. There’s nothing to go on. Usually, we have a good handle on what goes on around here. In Snowmass, in Aspen, in Glenwood, anywhere around here,” Fisher continued, “if some drunk cowboy picks up a girl in a bar, we know about it. Fast. We’ve got good grapevines. But on this thing we’ve got zero.”
But, Bob wondered, how could Caryn disappear in such total silence, out of a crowded lodge?
“I think someone just walked her out somehow. Maybe using some kind of ruse.”
Bob Campbell had a private thought about that. He wondered if his sister might have been approached by someone posing as a policeman. Later he would reflect, “I’m a police officer, and I’m her brother. Caryn always has respected the police. She wouldn’t ever go off with just anyone. But if some guy had shown her a badge and said he needed her assistance ...”
Venting his frustration, Bob conducted his own personal search, retracing Caryn’s steps—dozens of times—asking questions, looking in cars. He kicked away the snow cover to search the village garbage dump for anything—perhaps some article of his sister’s clothing. By Saturday, six days after Caryn’s disappearance, her brother had to give up and fly home to Fort Lauderdale to return to his job as a patrolman.
Fisher, a short, wiry man, with light-colored hair worn long to the collar, and a mustache which curled downward at the corners of his mouth, had specialized in cases of white-collar crime and narcotics trafficking common to the booming, affluent Aspen area. This kind of investigation was new to him, yet Fisher had immediately been fascinated by the circumstances of Caryn’s disappearance.
During his hours of questioning guests at the Wildwood Inn, Fisher had turned up one intriguing lead. Dr. Edward Brown, one of the visiting physicians, remembered that, while he was soaking in the swimming pool that evening—when the rising steam of the pool would have obscured his view of the walkway where Caryn had walked—he had talked briefly with a young man who was also there in the pool. Dr. Brown told Fisher he thought the man had said his name was Michael. “And I think he said he worked here at the lodge.”
Fisher spent weeks interviewing employees of the lodge, checking work applications, seeking former employees, but was unable to locate the “Michael” described by Dr. Brown.
* * *
A fluke period of balmy weather visited the Rockies in mid-February. Snow melted in the warm afternoon sunshine, and nighttime low temperatures hovered above freezing, softening and shrinking the mountain snowpack. On the morning of February 17, a car climbed through the curves, up from Aspen, along the slushy Owl Creek road, toward Sinclair Divide. At the summit, between Aspen and Snowmass, the woman driver, en route to her office job at Snowmass, noticed, off to her left, a flock of magpies fluttering above a snowfield. Perhaps, the woman thought, the big black-and-white birds were pecking on the carcass of a deer. Curious, she stopped the car, got out and strode to the edge of the roadway.
From there, through a screen of bare scrub-oak branches—perhaps seventy-five feet distant in a snowfield—she could see the birds were feasting on a human body. She ran to her car to drive to a telephone to notify police.
Within an hour, the officers’ cars and trucks had converged at the summit of the road, and the photography and crime-scene work began.
When the noisy magpies had been scattered into the nearby pines, Fisher and the other men could see that the body, face down, with one arm raised, was now mostly skeletal above the upper back.
If it was Caryn, Fisher reasoned, she had probably been brought by her killer directly to this remote summit, 2.8 miles from the lodge. Perhaps she was already dead by the time she had been dumped, pushed, or rolled over a roadside snowbank.
After being covered by snow, the body had been partially exposed by the February thaw. And then, obviously, the coyotes had reached her. “You can see she’s been dragged out onto that snowfield,” Fisher grumbled. Faint drag marks showed in the blood-pinkened snow between the body and the roadway.
The remains were placed in a body bag, then taken in a pickup truck to Aspen. From there Fisher telephoned ahead to Denver, to Dr. Donald Clark, a deputy coroner who arranged to perform the autopsy as soon as the body arrived in Denver.
Fisher had promised to telephone Caryn’s brother, Bob Campbell, in Florida as soon as anything turned up in the case. But while Fisher waited in Aspen for word from the coroner, the information leaked to the news media in Denver. The body was that of Caryn Campbell.
Dr. Clark said he couldn’t be absolutely certain what actually caused death. Damage to Caryn’s skull from some crushing blows could have been fatal, but she had been dumped into the snow nude, in severe subzero temperatures, so that death could have actually been caused by exposure. There was evidence of at least three separate blows to the head—obviously heavy blows from some object which seemed to have had some sharp surface. One blow had fallen along the lower jaw. A rear molar had been broken away below the gumline.
About 40 cubic centimeters of rather well-preserved food had been found in her stomach. The material, said the examiner, was “consistent with that of stew and milk”—the food which she had for dinner that night. It was an indication to Fisher and Baldridge that, as they suspected, Caryn had been killed shortly after she disappeared.
Not enough tissue had been left on the upper body to determine what kind of damage might have occurred at the throat. The Ranan acid-phosphate test, an indicator of semen residue, was negative in the anal area, positive in the vagina.
But there could be no conclusion whether or not her killer had sexually attacked Caryn.
Fisher and Baldridge’s investigation intensified. Now it was a certain case of murder. The two Colorado detectives flew to Michigan to make a thorough investigation of the two doctors who had last been with Caryn. The two men were cleared of any possible involvement.
In March, about one month after the discovery of Caryn’s body, Fisher and Baldridge heard that another young woman, about the same age and physical appearance of Caryn, had disappeared from Vail, another ski resort town about a hundred miles from Aspen. Although the Vail police department was strangely reluctant to give information to the Aspen police, Fisher learned that the vanished girl, Julie Cunningham, twenty-six, was an attractive brunette ski instructor, who had last been seen near her apartment during the early evening hours of March 15, perhaps around six o’clock.
“Hell, that’s about the same time of the evening Caryn went out,” snapped Fisher. “And she sounds awfully similar to Caryn.”
When Fisher and Baldridge went to Vail, they met a surprising lack of interest in the similarities from the Vail police chief, Gary Wall. Wall explained that Julie Cunningham was being handled as a routine missing person. There was no evidence of foul play and no body.
“But, Gary, it’s almost identical to the way our girl went out—on a weekend, at about the same time of the evening,” argued Fisher.
Wall explained that the small Vail police force was overburdened with work. President Gerald Ford and his family had chosen Vail as the place for the First Family’s ski vacations, and the Secret Service had been placing heavy demands on the local police. In fact, Dave Bustos, the Vail officer assigned to the Cunningham case, had spent most of that day on Vail’s streets, busy with skier traffic, performing patrol duty.
“Well, if you’re short of manpower,” Fisher replied, “we’d be glad to come in and help. These cases are too much alike.”
Wall declined the offer. It appeared to the visiting detectives that the Vail chief wasn’t anxious to have the publicity of a murder investigation in his town at a time when the President of the United States and his family were regular visitors.
* * *
A month later, in April 1975, Fisher and Baldridge went to Salt Lake City to confer with Salt Lake County detectives Jerry Thompson and Ben Forbes, and to compare their cases of look-alike murders, nearly 400 miles apart, in Utah and Colorado. In a darkened room they sat at a conference table, examining color slides being projected on twin screens—the autopsy photos of the bodies of Melissa Smith and Laura Aime, the girls murdered in Utah, and the remains of Caryn Campbell.
The detectives discussed similarities of all the cases. Never, they noted, at any of the scenes where the bodies were found, had a scrap of physical evidence been found. Each victim was found totally nude. No clothing was ever found. Each of the victims had last been seen moving from one place to another in darkness. The place where each girl was killed remained unknown, but the bodies were placed in a similar location—rural, mountainous, lightly traveled areas.
Even the physical damage to the victims was similar, the detectives concluded.
“Christ, that’s almost identical. You’ve got the same kind of fracture patterns of the skull.”
“Yeah. Even the same kind of jaw damage. And the ears.”
“A lot of violence there. It’s something heavy. Like maybe a tire iron or a lug wrench or something like that.”
“Melissa was strangled with a stocking. So was Laura Aime. It was violent strangulation. Knotted tighter ’n hell.”
“Well, of course we don’t know about strangulation in Caryn’s case. We didn’t have enough tissue left to tell. There’s a girl missing out of Vail, too. But we can’t get a goddamn thing out of the police down there about her case. So we don’t know.”
“Well, it looks like we have a similar problem.”
“That’s for sure.”
* * *
By late summer, seven months had elapsed since Caryn Campbell’s murder. Although scores of possible witnesses were interviewed around the United States—people who had been at Snowmass in January—the persistent investigation had turned up nothing. Meanwhile some other strange happenings had visited western Colorado—events which had Fisher and Baldridge wondering. Besides Julie Cunningham’s disappearance at Vail in March, a pretty young brunette, Denise Oliverson, twenty-five, had vanished at Grand Junction April 6. She had been bicycling that spring afternoon. Later her yellow bike was found beneath a bridge near the Colorado River, but weeks had elapsed, and no trace of her had been found.
In late June, Shelly Robertson, another young woman, had vanished from the Denver area. Now she was considered a possible murder victim, too.
Each of these disappearances, Fisher noted, had taken place not far from Interstate 70—the route which extends from Utah into and across Colorado. Sitting at his desk in the district attorney’s office behind the Aspen courthouse, Fisher reexamined reports of Utah’s murdered girls and contemplated the theory of the California investigator, Butch Carlstadt, that someone could be moving from place to place, always into a new police jurisdiction, systematically killing girls.
On Fisher’s desk, heaped with file folders, investigation notes, and reports, the telephone rang. He reached across the paperwork to lift the receiver.
“Hi, Mike, this is Jerry,” said the voice of his caller. “How y’doin?”
Fisher recognized the voice of Detective Jerry Thompson in Salt Lake City. “Fine, Jerry. What’s up?”
“We just picked up a guy here who looks kind of interesting in our cases,” Thompson reported. “Name of Theodore Robert Bundy.”
Fisher wrote the name on a yellow legal pad. Thompson continued, giving details about the suspect—twenty-eight years old, white, male, a law student at the University of Utah. Moved to Salt Lake from Seattle in the fall of ’74. Bundy had just been arrested a few days earlier, August 16, near Salt Lake City, driving a Volkswagen.
“Hmm, a Volkswagen, huh?”
“Yep,” agreed Thompson. Both the detectives had become well informed about the Washington State cases, especially Seattle’s “Ted” suspect with the Volkswagen. Thompson gave the Colorado investigator other details of the arrest—the handcuffs and other paraphernalia which had been found in the Volkswagen. Handcuffs, emphasized Thompson. There were handcuffs in the DaRonch kidnapping.
“I’m going to try to interview him,” Thompson went on. “We’re going to try to make a search of Mr. Bundy’s apartment.”
“Well, if you do,” replied Fisher, “see if you can pick up anything that could put him in Colorado.”
Thompson agreed. Five days later, Thompson called again to report to Fisher on the search of the suspect’s apartment.
“Mike, this Bundy’s a real cool guy,” said Thompson. “He was real nice and pleasant when we searched his place. I did find a brochure in there—a pamphlet called Colorado Ski Country. I asked him if he’d ever been to Colorado, but he said he never had been there. Never to Aspen or Vail. But in this brochure he had at his place, there’s a little check mark beside one of your resorts down there. Name of—uh—the Wildwood Inn.”
“You’re shittin’ me, Jerry,” Fisher growled. “That’s the place where our girl went out! What else did you get? Any credit cards or anything like that?”
“Yeah. I picked up a receipt for a gas charge. Bundy’s got a Chevron card.”
“Got the number?”
“Yep. It’s—ahh—Number 769-002-2475. Chevron.”
Fisher jotted it down. “I know a guy at Standard Oil,” said Fisher. “I’m pretty sure I can get a run on the card charges. ... We’ll find out if he’s ever been to Colorado.”
Thompson explained that Bundy would probably be put under surveillance in Salt Lake City.
“I’ll get back to you on the gas charges,” Fisher promised.
It took a while, but Fisher’s pleading and pestering speeded the process. Ray Nordquist, Fisher’s helpful Standard Oil Company source, notified Fisher that a computer printout of the gas charges was available in Standard’s Denver office. When Fisher arrived at the office, Nordquist handed him a neatly stacked and stapled bundle of slips.
Fisher grabbed them. When his eye fell on the top slip, the reaction seemed to leap out of Fisher’s belly: “KEEEE-riist!”
That slip on the top of the stack was for a gas purchase, on Bundy’s credit card, January 12 at Glenwood Springs. “So he’s practically right next door to Snowmass on the day Caryn disappeared,” Fisher breathed.
Startled by Fisher’s reaction, Nordquist pleaded, “I want a subpoena.”
“You’ll get it,” Fisher promised, hurrying out of the office.
As his fingers shuffled through the slips, Fisher’s eye paused on another charge: 3/15/75 ... eight-plus gallons of gas, $4.02 ... Golden Colorado. That would place Bundy, or his card, right near Vail the day Julie Cunningham disappeared there.
Another slip: 4/16/75 ... a $3.16 charge at Grand Junction. The day Denise Oliverson disappeared in Grand Junction.
Fisher ran to a telephone to inform Baldridge, his partner in the Campbell investigation. Then he drove to Boulder to share the new information with Bob Demming, the investigator in the disappearance of Shelly Robertson. Together they placed phone calls to Salt Lake City and other places to inform Thompson and other investigators of the credit-card “matches” with dates and places of Colorado crimes.
* * *
There had been two Chevron gas purchases on Bundy’s card at Glenwood Springs, near Snowmass, around the time of Caryn Campbell’s murder—one at Clayton Brothers’ station, near Interstate 70, where the freeway enters Glenwood from Utah; the other at Adair’s, at the south edge of Glenwood, along the highway leading toward Aspen and Snowmass.
The two investigators went first to Adair’s, to interview the station owner, hoping they might be able to find someone who could “eyewitness” Bundy as the gas customer that night.
At Adair’s, the station owner, a burly man in coveralls, studied the gas slip which Fisher handed to him. Then he shrugged. “Of course, I wasn’t here that day,” he said. “That was a Sunday, wasn’t it?”
“Right. But,” said Fisher, pointing to the slip, “you’ve got these initials on there. It’s kinda hard to make out, but it looks like someone initialed the sales slip. Like ‘T.M.’ Would that be the attendant who sold the gas?”
“Yeah,” nodded the station owner. “That would have been Tom. He would have been working alone that Sunday. He was always real faithful about putting his initials on a charge slip.”
“We’d sure like to talk to Tom,” replied Fisher. “Where can we find him?”
“You won’t.”
“Why?”
“Well, I heard he committed suicide in a motel over at Denver last February.”
“Goddammit!”
Fisher and Baldridge sought and found and interviewed men who had worked at both gas stations, but no one could remember, among hundreds of cards and drivers, selling gas to Bundy. There was no eyewitness at either gas station.
* * *
Studying the gas-card charges, conferring by telephone with Thompson and others checking Bundy activities in Seattle and Salt Lake City, Fisher began to construct a theory that Bundy’s spasms of travel could have something to do with the man’s emotional condition.
“Somewhere on his drives—on some of those long stretches of lonely highway between Utah and Colorado—it was obvious he sometimes paid cash for gas. But there are enough credit-card charges to figure it out. On the tenth of January—that’s the Friday before Caryn goes out—he’s gassin’ in Salt Lake City. But he’s putting on lots of miles. He’s making gas purchases the equivalent of 420 miles of driving in one day! All in the Salt Lake City metro area. Ted’s trolling. [That became Fisher’s visualization of Bundy driving, driving, moving, looking—Ted, the troller, “fishing” for a victim.] Then on the next day, the eleventh, he’s coming in here to Colorado. He gasses at Glenwood on the twelfth and Caryn goes out. On the thirteenth we have him buying gas over at Green River, Utah, on his way out. And next he’s buying gas in Salt Lake City. And it’s quiet for a while.
“It’s like clockwork. He starts out with a lull, then builds to a peak of activity, in his driving, over a period of approximately, but not quite, thirty days. And he hits that peak. Then, ZOOM! On the March trip it’s Julie Cunningham at Vail.
“Then it’s quiet again, without a great deal of driving activity for a week or two. Then it starts to build up. And he’s back driving again. Prior to the departure there’s a great deal of driving activity around Salt Lake City.
“And then, ZOOM! Back into Colorado, and we have Denise Oliverson out of Grand Junction.”
After Bundy had been charged and jailed in Salt Lake City, the Aspen detectives were hosts for the November 1975 “summit conference” on the cases of missing and murdered girls in the Western states. Fisher reported to fellow investigators on all the gas slips which pointed toward Bundy as the suspect in the Colorado cases. But neither Fisher nor anyone else had anything solid to tie Bundy to a murder. The FBI laboratory had been asked to examine vacuumings from the man’s Volkswagen, but the analysis—and comparison with body traces of the murder victims—would take a while.
* * *
January 1976, almost exactly a year following Caryn’s disappearance, found Fisher still working on the case, still locating and interviewing people who had been at the Wildwood Inn the evening of the crime. Two California doctors and their wives returned to the Wildwood that month for another vacation stay together—in the same place they’d registered for the 1975 cardiovascular seminar. When he learned that Dr. and Mrs. Harold Brown and Dr. and Mrs. Richard Harter were at the ski lodge, Fisher decided to reinterview Dr. Brown. It was Dr. Brown who had remembered the mysterious “Michael” in the swimming pool around the time Caryn vanished.
When Fisher arrived at Dr. Brown’s room, he carried with him a large white envelope which contained mug shots of a photo lineup. One of the photographs was that of Bundy. After their greeting and handshake, Fisher quietly spread out the photographs on a desk, saying, “Take your time, Doctor. Just look them all over carefully.”
Dr. Brown examined the pictures, one after another, shaking his head, saying, “No” ... “No” ... “No.” So it went through the entire selection of photos. Finally, Dr. Brown told Fisher the “Michael” he remembered was none of the men in the photos. He had passed over the photograph of Bundy with no sign of recognition.
When it was over, Fisher grinned and shrugged. “Well, thank you anyway, Dr. Brown.” Fisher hadn’t expected anything else. Dr. Brown’s original description of the “Michael” in the swimming pool had never been very close to a description of Bundy anyway.
Moments later, the others, Mrs. Brown and Dr. and Mrs. Harter, entered from the adjoining room. “Hello there, Mr. Fisher,” said Mrs. Brown. “Nice to see you again. It’s been almost a year now, hasn’t it?”
“Hello,” replied Fisher. “Yes. Just about a year.” Dr. Brown complimented the mustached investigator on his persistence in trying to solve the crime.
“Well, you gotta keep tryin’,” Fisher explained to the others. “I just came here today to have Dr. Brown take a look at some photographs.”
Mrs. Harter’s eyes turned toward the white envelope. “May I see the photographs?” she asked.
“Okay,” said Fisher. He took the photos from the envelope and handed them to the middle-aged California woman. She took one from the stack and, in an urgent tone, asked, “Mr. Fisher, how tall is this man?”
“Why do you ask, Mrs. Harter?” Fisher kept his voice low, calm. She was holding Bundy’s photograph.
“Well, he’s the strange man I saw by the elevator.”
“What strange man, Mrs. Harter?”
The doctor’s wife recalled something she’d never mentioned before. That night in January 1975, about the time the girl disappeared, Mrs. Harter had walked from her room to the drugstore below the lodge. She recalled she needed to buy some Pepto-Bismol. She’d seen that strange man standing near the elevator. She remembered him particularly, she explained, because he seemed so out of place. “He wasn’t in ski clothes—just a jacket and pants. And bareheaded. He wasn’t wearing ski boots.”
Fisher contained his excitement. “Mrs. Harter,” he asked quietly, “would you please put your initials and the date here on the back of this photo to indicate you identified this one?”
Lizabeth Harter obliged. On the back of the photo she wrote, “L.B.H. 1-9-76.”
* * *
After a full year of work, Fisher had put together a few pieces of his puzzle. There were the credit-card slips, the Colorado ski brochure found in Bundy’s apartment by Jerry Thompson, and now an eyewitness who could actually place Bundy at the Wildwood Inn the night Caryn disappeared.
It wasn’t enough for a case.
The next scrap of potential evidence came in early 1976 as Ted Bundy was going to trial in Utah for the DaRonch kidnapping.
The FBI forensic specialists had completed their examination of vacuumings from Bundy’s Volkswagen, and made their comparisons with samples from murder victims’ bodies. The report caused a stir in the investigations in both Utah and Colorado.
A pubic hair vacuumed from the trunk of the Volkswagen owned by Bundy was found to be “microscopically indistinguishable” from a pubic hair specimen removed from the body of Melissa Smith, the girl found murdered in the mountains above Salt Lake City in October 1974.
At the same time, Robert Neill, the FBI’s veteran expert on hair specimens, notified Fisher that Specimen PC-L 6351—hair samples taken from the head of Caryn Campbell during her autopsy at Denver—had been found to be “microscopically indistinguishable” from one hair vacuumed from the front floor mat of the Volkswagen and a second hair vacuumed from the trunk of Bundy’s Volkswagen.
That kind of a hair “match,” unlike a fingerprint, isn’t proof of identification. But in a telephone conversation, Neill assured Fisher there was a strong indication that the hairs taken from the Volkswagen could have come from Caryn Campbell. By at least fifteen microscopic criteria, Caryn Campbell’s hair was identical to the hairs in Bundy’s car, said Neill.
Fisher though it might be time to talk with Ted Bundy.
* * *
On March 1, 1976, Judge Stewart Hanson had, in that tense moment in the Salt Lake City courtroom, pronounced Ted Bundy guilty of the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. While a presentence investigation began, Bundy was in the Salt Lake County jail.
A few days later, Fisher and Baldridge arrived in Salt Lake City where, after some preliminary negotiations with Dave Yocom, the assistant Salt Lake County attorney, and John O’Connell, Bundy’s lawyer, it was agreed that the Aspen investigators could meet and talk with Bundy. Bundy’s and O’Connell’s willingness for such an interview had come as a surprise. Until then, Bundy had resisted talking with police about anything.
Fisher guessed that Bundy was willing to talk with him in an effort to find out some information for himself. Through leaks to the news media, there had been widespread publicity about Bundy’s credit-card purchases in Colorado. More recently, the Salt Lake County sheriff’s office had leaked word of “some new physical evidence” in the Caryn Campbell murder—a reference to the still-secret FBI report on the hair specimens. Fisher anticipated that Bundy might spar his way through an interview, seeking to find out as much as he could about the Colorado case.
Bundy met the Colorado investigators for the first time in the late afternoon, March 11, 1976.
Fisher and Baldridge studied the slender, good-looking young man, his dark hair trimmed neatly around the ears, as he greeted them cordially in the Salt Lake County jail.
Fisher motioned Bundy to take a seat at a table, in a chair where his back would be to the steel wall of the visiting room. Fisher sat opposite him, Baldridge nearby. With a trace of anxiety Bundy examined the tape recorder the investigators had set up on the table between him and Fisher.
Bundy’s lawyer, obviously wary of the interview, delivered an opening speech for the record:
“I want to start out by saying that, for the last five or six months we have been attempting through the local law enforcement agencies ... to get information on the Colorado cases. We have been constantly informed ... the authorities in Colorado refuse to allow them to release any information. And so all the information we have is that ... leaked to the press. ... Mr. Bundy has been subjected to these Kafka-type interrogations before. ... I think it ought to start out with—uh—you telling us something about what you’re investigating. ...”
Fisher replied that he and Baldridge were investigating the Caryn Campbell murder at Snowmass, near Aspen, and were interested in Bundy’s activities “from, let’s say, January tenth, which would have been a Friday, through January twelfth and thirteenth ... January 1975.” Fisher laid an open pack of cigarettes on the table. Bundy seemed to want a smoke. Fisher offered one. Bundy accepted and lighted up. Fisher left the Marlboro pack lying there. “Do you recall—uh—where you were on or about January tenth, 1975? That would have been a Friday,” Fisher asked.
“No, I do not. I mean, I’ve been so ... ‘I really can’t remember’ would be a more accurate statement. I have no records. I have no records before me, no diary. ...”
“Okay. During January 1975, Ted, were you ever in the State of Colorado?”
“Possible. Uhhh—it’s—it’s possible. Uh—I can’t say for sure, okay?”
(Fisher had anticipated Bundy might “turn” on that question. When Salt Lake Detective Jerry Thompson first asked the question of Bundy after his arrest the previous August, Bundy had told him he’d never been to Colorado. But, since then, Bundy and others had learned that Fisher had the credit-card receipts in Colorado.)
“If you were in the State of Colorado, do you know where you would have been?”
“Uh—in the general Rocky Mountain area, you know. Like I don’t know—recall—names of the routes or the cities. Uh—I don’t know the area that well to say for sure.”
Fisher asked pointedly about the town of Glenwood Springs and, especially, a gas purchase there on January 12. “Here,” he said, handing Bundy the copy of the gas-purchase receipt from Adair’s Chevron. Bundy studied it for a moment and quietly replied that he didn’t recognize the place. Fisher unfolded a Colorado road map and handed it to Bundy, pointing out Glenwood Springs.
Lighting another cigarette, Bundy studied the map. Fisher noticed that the map trembled slightly in Bundy’s hand. Bundy turned to study the gas slip again.
“Do you recall making that purchase, Ted?”
“Well, not specifically. It appears to be my signature and—uh—I certainly wouldn’t deny that it’s my signature, if you asked me. But I don’t remember making that purchase.”
“Have you ever been to Aspen, Ted?”
“I recall clearly one time, years ago, first of all. I think it was ’69 I was there. And I’m trying to remember if, for sure, I was there at any other time—in January, or last year. And I’m not really sure of that. I know that at some point in time that I passed by Vail, but simply because it’s on the main highway. But I can’t say for sure.”
Fisher made a mental note that Bundy, while unable to remember if he’d been to Aspen in 1975, could remember being there in 1969. That earlier visit to Aspen, Fisher already knew from the Seattle police background check of Bundy, had been a stop on Bundy’s 1969 travels from Seattle to Philadelphia.
“You don’t recall being in Aspen in January of last year? Is that right?”
“I can’t—uh—I can’t say for sure. No. I—I—I’m not denying it. But I still—I still—I still can’t recall.”
Fisher leaned across the table, moving his face a few inches closer to Bundy’s. Then, deliberately, the detective noisily cleared his sinuses. It was a Fisher habit and an unsettling sound. He pressed Bundy to confirm again that the signature on the gas receipt was his.
“Yes,” Bundy replied. It was apparently his signature. “I mean—I—my card was not stolen or missing during that period. And I did use my credit card during that period on a trip through—that I may have taken to Colorado.”
“Do you recall even the name of the hotel, something like that, you may have stayed?”
“Well, it’s hard to separate the one or two trips I’ve—I made, to Colorado last year. Uh—I remember having slept in my car a couple of occasions, simply because I didn’t have much money.”
Here, Fisher noted, was a concession. Bundy remembered one or two trips. Deliberately, Fisher leaned his upper body even closer to Bundy’s, to invade his body space, sensing that was bothersome to the young man. There was perspiration on Bundy’s brow. He mashed a cigarette in the ashtray on the table. Fisher pressed for more specific recollections from that January trip.
Bundy lighted another cigarette and his voice faltered: “I have trouble—uh—recalling that specific trip, separating it out from any other trip that I’ve had. Mainly I just drove and—uh—just drove off a side road somewhere and—uh—came to a point where I didn’t want to go any further, the road got steep or something, and turned around and went back to the main road.”
Baldridge stiffened imperceptibly in his chair. That vague description sounded like the road off the Glenwood-Aspen highway, the spur road up into the basin of Snowmass Village, and, perhaps, even the snow-covered Owl Creek pass where Caryn’s body was dumped.
Bundy’s lawyer, standing, listened in silence. He watched his client intently.
When Bundy raised a hand to his forehead, Fisher noticed that sweat had drenched the underarms of his T-shirt.
“And the purpose of your trip was just to drive, just to get out of Salt Lake?”
“Yeah. Just to drive, relax. See some scenery. Uh—it—uh—to get away from the pressure of law exams. I wasn’t really prepared for them at that time, as I recall. I just—uh—it’s something to do to set my mind at ease and to think while I was driving—which is something I do quite a lot.”
Yeah, I’ve noticed that, Fisher thought privately. Then, aloud: “Do you recall whether or not you slept in your car on that particular trip?”
“I may have. I—uh—if it was any—anywhere from two to three days, I probably did.”
“Yes, we’re talking about January the twelfth now. ... It was a cold part of the year.” Freeze-your-ass cold, thought Fisher. Like you’d really remember.
“I can’t say for sure. Probably was. I can’t say for sure where I would have stayed that night, ’cause I don’t remember that day or that evening, January the twelfth.”
(Fisher and Baldridge in their months of trying, had never turned up a single witness to place Bundy at any motel along the route the night before or after Caryn was murdered. He’d made a gas purchase back in Salt Lake City on Monday, the thirteenth.)
“Ted, evidently you talked to Detective Jerry Thompson of Salt Lake County sheriff’s office. Uh—did you tell him that you had never been to the state of Colorado?”
“Well, okay. The fact is, I have been to Colorado. I think it—this is—well ... There’d be just no reason why I’d tell another lie.”
“I’m going to ask you really specifically, did you meet a young lady at Snowmass-at-Aspen, Colorado, on January the twelfth? That’s a Sunday. And it’s in the evening. Did you meet a woman anywhere near that area on January the twelfth, 1975?”
There was silence. Breathing heavily, Bundy studied the smoke curling from a cigarette in his fingers. At last he answered, “No, I didn’t.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I mean I don’t recall having been to that area. But—but—if I’d met a young woman, I would remember it.”
“On January the twelfth, 1975, did you kill that young lady there near Snowmass-at-Aspen, Colorado?”
“I certainly didn’t kill anyone, anywhere. And I—wherever I was—I didn’t kill anyone.”
“But you don’t recall any of the occurrences that happened on that trip?”
“Well, yeah. Of course I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to specific places or signposts or mileage, traveling. Uh—but one thing you would remember, I mean. ...” Bundy’s voice trailed into a dry laugh. “It’s certainly. Almost. I won’t say that it’s—it’s ... Unfortunately it concerns you very much. But if you ...” He took a drag from a cigarette. “If you meet someone, you’d remember. Especially if you start up a relationship with them. That was not my intention. Nor did I do that. Uh—and as far as the question ‘Did I kill anyone?’ I certainly didn’t. It sounds absurd to say so, but you’d remember if you’ve done something like that. I certainly didn’t.”
The two investigators—and Bundy’s lawyer—stared at the young man’s perspiring face and his unsteady smile.
Fisher pressed for more of Bundy’s recollections about the January trip.
“I can remember having, say, stopped and gotten—got gas. And then maybe taken a—a side road, for—for a short distance. And then just trying to remember, coming back to the main road. Just a sort of nice, exploratory venture.”
His voice was low. The end of that sentence was spoken almost lyrically: A nice, exploratory kind of venture.
What the hell was he saying? Fisher and Baldridge later would contemplate that phrase again and again. Could that be an allegoric reference to killing? A mystical allusion to murder?
“Can you describe the road to me at all, Ted? What did it look like? What was on it?”
“Well, I—I—again, I don’t know if it’s this particular time or not. I had one road that turned off into—below the city there. There were some gas stations. I remember gas stations driving up. And it went by a lake. And then it went by the ski resort. And I drove up there and stopped for a while. Then drove back to the main road and got some more gas. Another road I can remember. It got really quite steep and very snowy. And I just decided when I got to the summit that I’d turn around and come back.”
It was an ambiguous description. It could fit many places in the Colorado Rocky Mountain region. Yet it could describe the drive from Glenwood, off the side road up into Snowmass Village. And then it went by the ski resort. And I drove up there and stopped for a while. At the Wildwood Inn? Was he saying that? It got really quite steep and very snowy. The Owl Creek road summit, where Caryn was left in the snowstorm that night? The finale of a nice exploratory kind of venture?
Bundy enthused that Volkswagens “are just a superior car in the snow.” Bundy said he sometimes slept in the VW, so Fisher asked him how he managed to do that.
“You put the back seat down, slide the front seat forward as far—maybe even off the tracks—as far forward as you can. And then that space in the back of the Volkswagen, while uncomfortable, is big enough to curl up in.”
Fisher knew from his research in Washington and Utah that sometimes, in the suspect’s VW, the passenger seat was in place. Sometimes it was removed. Fisher asked, “Can you recall whether or not the seat was out on that particular trip?”
“I’d seriously doubt that I would take the seat out on that particular trip.”
On that particular trip. Fisher paused at that reply, his thoughts racing. What in the goddamm hell did that suggest? Those two coeds who went with the weird-looking man to the Volkswagen on the campus of Central Washington University at Ellensburg, where Susan Rancourt had vanished, noticed the passenger seat was gone. At Lake Sammamish, where the two Washington victims went out the same summer day, the seat was in place. When Carol DaRonch was kidnapped, there was a passenger seat in place. What determined whether the seat would be in—or out—when Bundy began a trip? Fisher decided to leave that question unasked for a while.
When the investigator pressed for more details about Bundy’s Colorado travels, the usual answer was “I don’t recall.” However Bundy eventually acknowledged some recollections of the towns of Grand Junction and Dillon, in the vicinity of Vail. Those were the places where there had been gas purchases about the times Denise Oliverson and Julie Cunningham disappeared.
Fisher decided to end the interview. After some moments when he appeared rattled, Bundy had rallied and seemed to collect his composure the longer they talked.
The investigators rose from the table. Baldridge punched the “off” button of the tape recorder, and they said their good-byes.
“We’ll see you again, Ted,” grinned Fisher.
“Fine,” replied Bundy with a smile.
O’Connell said good-bye to his client, and the Colorado men left Bundy there in the jail.
Later, when Fisher and Baldridge were alone outdoors, Baldridge summed it up. At least, he said, they had pried some concessions out of Bundy about his travels in Colorado. And he had been locked into a recorded story.
“Yeah,” agreed Fisher. “And I dunno if you noticed it or not, but he smoked up nearly all of my cigarettes. I think Theodore’s a little worried about Colorado.”