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There was a kaleidoscopic aftermath to Ted Bundy’s freedom leap at Aspen.
Pale, weak, and skinny after his ordeal in the Rockies, Ted managed some gaunt grins, when he heard how he had become a full-fledged Aspen celebrity—with Ted Bundy T-shirts and the Bundy-inspired cartoons lampooning the Pitkin County sheriff’s office. One Aspenite named her newborn quarterhorse colt Ted Bundy, saying, “It’ll know how to run.” Bundy had made the cops look silly, and that, in the view of the habitués of the Jerome bar and other Aspen hangouts, was a beautiful trip.
Ted added to the festival of comment with his dry question: “Did anyone see who it was that pushed me out that window?”
There was an investigation of the sheriff’s department’s lapse of security in the courtroom. There were some resignations and firings (some of them more political than escape-related), but Sheriff Kienast emerged, predictably, unscathed.
For Chuck Leidner, the public defender, Ted had been a troublesome, argumentative, demanding client. Now, because Leidner and Jim Dumas had been in the courthouse and thus would be potential witnesses to their client’s escape, a crime, the defenders were excused as Ted Bundy’s advisory counsel.
During his brief visit in Aspen, John Henry Browne, Ted’s Seattle counselor, spurred Bundy to accept new court-appointed counsel to represent him on the escape-related charges, as he was urging his friend also to consider giving up his pro se murder defense. Ted had seemed contemptuous of his public-defender lawyers, perhaps because they were public lawyers, whose practice usually involved indigents, usually petty-crime defendants. Browne and Bundy were conspicuously pleased when, during a post-escape hearing, Judge Lohr appointed Stephen (Buzzy) Ware, a brilliant Aspen lawyer, a private-practice specialist in major-crimes defense, to represent Ted. Named as Ware’s associate was Kenneth Dresner.
Later, when I met with Ted in his cell at the Garfield County jail at Glenwood Springs, I found him enthusiastic, almost euphoric, about his new lawyers. “They just left the cell here a few minutes ago,” Ted told me cheerfully. “We had a couple hours together. Our first meeting. And I was really impressed. It went awfully well.
“Dick,” he continued, “I’m so impressed with their imagination. Not only their ability to comprehend this case as quickly as they have—it’s just incredible—but their imagination. It just runs rampant! Just like my own!
“I always appreciate people that have that kind of creativity.”
Ted continued in a rush of praise for Buzzy Ware. “And Buzzy ... Just great! It’s the silver lining to the whole thing. Who would have thought that, coming to Colorado, that not only would I be in the driver’s seat in my own case, but [that I’d have] my own investigator, my own hair expert, my own pathologist, my own very first-rate attorneys. I’m far better off than I was in the Utah thing.”
“Sounds great,” I replied. Despite new problems, Ted was brimming with confidence. New security restraints had been placed on him over at Aspen. He’d have to wear leg irons during his courtroom appearances, and the Pitkin County guards watched him more carefully. Judge Lohr had ordered tighter rules on Ted’s use of a telephone. But Ted still was a pro se defendant and maintained his telephoning and other privileges, including regular trips from the cell where we were visiting to the nearby law library in the Garfield County courthouse.
When I had come to Glenwood Springs to see Ted there that day, I had been surprised at the casualness of the Garfield County jailers. I hadn’t been searched. Instead, the obliging deputy had taken me directly to Ted’s cell and locked me inside with him. Occasionally I glanced at the small window of the solid steel door, but there was no guard to be seen. (Eventually, after an hour, Ted and I would have to pound on the door to get me out.)
His jump, Ted said, was probably triggered by his lengthy isolation and confinement—“in a six- by twelve- by six-foot-high cell, where people are ordered not to speak to me.” He lifted both hands toward the walls and ceiling of the steel box where we stood, each of us leaning uncomfortably against the upper cot.
“Well, since the escape,” Ted grinned, “I’ve gotten lots of mail.” He gestured toward a box of letters and envelopes in the mounds and boxes of legal documents and books stored on the top bunk. “I got one very charming little note from a girl. She’s ten or eleven or twelve years old, I don’t know. Complete with her picture. Neat little girl ... She’s the only girl Golden Gloves boxer. ...” We both began to shake with laughter.
“A girl Golden Gloves boxer?”
“True,” said Ted, almost giggling. He explained: “She was a big media favorite in Utah. You know why? She and Gary Gilmore were very close. He gave her a bicycle. He wrote to her constantly from prison, and she wrote to him. ... I’ve got her letter somewhere here.”
Ted rummaged through his correspondence and pulled out her letter. “And I disagree totally with the Gary Gilmore trip, right? But she was really into it. Anyway, she says, ‘He fought for his right to die and he won his fight.’”
“Yeah, Gilmore won, I guess,” I observed. “If that’s how you define victory.”
“He sure did,” said Ted. “And she says, ‘I was hoping you would win your fight for freedom. And I believe you’re innocent.’ Y’know,” Ted concluded, folding the girl’s note, “it was a nice letter, and I wrote back to her.”
I asked Ted how he felt about the whole new array of charges facing him—the murder charge and now all the other charges of escape, car theft, and the others. It was obvious now there would be delays in the murder trial. “How will they proceed with all these other charges? What’ll be the scenario?”
“Well, how about this for a scenario?” Ted began. “I am not only found innocent of the murder charge, but I am given a new trial in the DaRonch case. And I’m found not convicted of anything. But I would stand faced with the escape charges.”
He stood in the middle of the cell, delivering that prediction, like a speech, with intensity. “And,” I replied, “the escape charge just would never be prosecutable if it involved a man who’d been jailed but not guilty?”
“Exactly right,” Ted said.
In his initial appearance on Ted’s behalf, Ware had begun to dissect the escape-related charges. The burglary of the cabin might not have been a burglary at all, Ware noted, because the cabin technically wasn’t a “dwelling.” And, in the taking of the Cadillac, there was no evidence of theft, “merely joy riding.”
Stephen Arnold Ware, thirty-four, had an impressive, extensive private law practice. Sometimes he flew his own plane to distant courtrooms to represent wealthy clients in major racketeering and narcotics cases. In appearance, Ware was a blend of the urbane and rustic—quick witted, wry, lively eyes peering through thick glasses, and a shock of blond hair topped by a cowlick. He had a penchant for speed—by plane, car, or motorcycle. On the early morning of Thursday, August 11, 1977, only a few weeks after he began representing Bundy, Ware crashed his motorcycle at high speed into a rock wall beside a highway near Aspen. Ware’s wife, Pamela, was killed outright. Ware’s face and skull were smashed. A helicopter whisked him to St. Anthony’s Hospital in Denver where he remained in a coma for days.
“God, it’s a tragedy,” said Ted as we discussed the accident later by telephone. “Just awful.” Ted choked in tears. Eventually Ware would make a long, slow recovery, but he would be of no further help to Bundy.
* * *
Bundy’s soaring confidence and his cheerful belief in, “the silver lining” he’d found in Colorado turned abruptly to dark anger. The prosecution served notice of its intent to introduce “similar transaction” evidence in his trial. Milt Blakey, the prosecutor, moved to have the court consider in the Caryn Campbell case the facts and circumstances involved in the Utah murders of Melissa Smith and Laura Aime, the disappearance of Debbie Kent and the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. Under Colorado law, it was possible to introduce into one case evidence of “other, similar acts or transactions of the defendant.”
If testimony about the Utah cases could be introduced in the Colorado trial, it would be a substantial bolstering of a thin case, which had almost been fractured by Lizabeth Harter’s failure to identify Bundy in court.
Bundy told me he was thinking about complaining to the Colorado Bar Association about, what he called the “unprofessional and unethical conduct of the prosecution” in seeking to introduce those other cases. “They’re just goddamn desperate,” Bundy snapped. Here he was, holding his own, punching holes in their weak murder case, he grumbled, “and now they’re talking about three homicides, a missing person, and a kidnapping. And I don’t think it’s right.”
* * *
“You know,” said Mike Fisher, the Aspen investigator, “they’re just absolutely identical.”
Milt Blakey, the prosecutor, sitting in Fisher’s Aspen office, nodded in agreement. For hours he and Fisher had been going over the case reports from Utah, comparing the autopsy photos and reports on the murdered Melissa Smith and Laura Aime, with the autopsy and photos of Caryn Campbell.
There should be little trouble, Blakey reckoned, in getting the Carol DaRonch kidnapping into the case. It would be worth the effort too, to attempt to introduce the Debbie Kent disappearance as a “similar,” considering the handcuff key found at Viewmont High School where Debbie disappeared, plus the two witnesses who placed Bundy at the high school that night.
“There’s a possibility, too, in the Smith case,” Blakey added. Melissa’s autopsy, her cause of death, the damage to the skull and jaw were like the damage to Caryn Campbell. And there was the other wispy link—the hair specimens, comparable to both Caryn’s and Melissa’s hair, both found in Bundy’s Volkswagen.
“Now in the Laura Aime murder,” Fisher explained, “we got a lot of trouble. Her murder’s identical. A carbon copy. She goes out right after they find Melissa’s body. And look at the strangulation and skull damage.”
Blakey nodded, again studying the autopsy photos.
“But,” continued Fisher, “the trouble is, we cannot get one goddamn bit of help out of the Utah County sheriff up there in Provo. I don’t know what’s going on. But they’re absolutely uncooperative.”
“About the hair in the Volkswagen ...” Blakey began. Fisher nodded. Both men had the same thought: What if there still remained, undetected in Bundy’s Volkswagen, a hair which would match the hair of Laura Aime?
Bob Neill, the FBI specialist, had already testified he’d never before encountered a situation where hair samples, all found in one car, “matched” the hair of three different victims.
Both Fisher and Blakey wondered if there might be a fourth to be found—Laura Aime’s.
“They’ve vacuumed the hell out of Theodore’s car up in Salt Lake,” said Fisher. “But I’d like to have our guys at the CBI [Colorado Bureau of Investigation] lab really tear the goddamn thing apart.”
“Worth a try,” said Blakey.
Once again, the tireless Fisher hit the trail—to pick up the largely stripped Volkswagen from the Salt Lake County impoundment garage, load it into a van, and haul it to Denver to the CBI laboratory. Already the seats and everything removable was gone from the interior of the VW, the result of the searches and vacuumings by Jerry Thompson and the others in Salt Lake County.
At the Denver lab, Fisher waited while lab specialists stripped away the headliner, the side panels and dug into tiny crevices of the floor, especially the well beneath the emergency brake, vacuuming, testing for any more trace evidence to be submitted to examination.
Completing his thousand-mile marathon, Fisher drove the van, carrying the skeletonized Volkswagen, back to Salt Lake City.
* * *
Through the months of 1977, a strange political law-enforcement feud had been going on in the Utah County Courthouse at Provo, in Utah’s Mormon heartland. Sheriff Mack Holley and most of his men had quickly concluded, after Laura Aime’s body was found in November 1974, that her death was unrelated to the crimes in neighboring Salt Lake County. And Holley had pointedly informed the Salt Lake investigators to stay out of his case.
Later, however, Utah County had an aggressive new county attorney, Noal Wootton, who brought into his office a well-trained investigator, Brent Bullock. As he studied the Salt Lake County crimes, talked with the investigators, Bullock concluded, “Hell, this Laura Aime case is like theirs. It sounds to me like it was the same guy.”
But Holley and Sergeant Owen Quarnberg, the sheriff’s initial investigator, stubbornly disputed that. Despite the doubts of Laura’s parents and some other deputies who’d been involved, the Utah sheriff’s department had taken the position that Laura had been a runaway, a hitchhiker, who had probably been living somewhere, or held somewhere, for several days between her October 31 disappearance and the time her body was found twenty-seven days later in American Fork Canyon.
It was a chance conversation that day in early ’77. Sitting in his office, discussing the Aime case with Dick Smith, a sheriff’s deputy, Bullock uttered a thought: “I just wonder if we could ever place Bundy down here in Utah County around that time.”
“Shit, yes,” replied Smith. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you?”
“Tell me what?” asked Bullock.
“Well, way back, after Bundy was picked up and charged, I came across a girl who identified Bundy as the guy who’d been hanging out over at Brown’s Cafe, at Lehi, where Laura Aime disappeared.”
“WHAAT?” Bullock bolted forward in his chair.
No one else in the sheriff’s department seemed interested at the time, though, complained Smith. “And I was just a lowly deputy.”
On his own, getting some help from Smith, from Fisher at Aspen, and from the Salt Lake County detectives, Bullock began pushing a reinvestigation.
From Smith’s witness, Marin Beverige, a girlfriend of Laura Aime, came a startling new version of the case.
Marin told Smith and Bullock that an older, good-looking, wavy-haired man, who said he was a university student and who drove a Volkswagen, had first appeared at the small town of Lehi one day in September 1974. Marin remembered that she and Laura were sitting together in sunshine with some other teenagers on the grass of a high school. He joined them. When a boy teased Laura by putting some grass down her halter top, the “college guy” objected. “This guy came unglued and told him [the boy] Laura was his,” Marin said.
“He was really weird,” Marin continued. She recalled the man kept reappearing in Lehi, always looking for Laura. One night at Brown’s Café on the main street of the small town, Marin recalled, “He came in and was sitting there talking and I got up. ... When Laura said, ‘I’m ready to go,’ this guy said, ‘You can’t. I’m going to rape you.’”
“Laura just laughed and pushed him away.”
Marin told her interviewers she had seen the man again and again, once driving his Volkswagen past Marin’s house when Laura was there. One night he came to the house and called Laura outdoors where they held a private conversation. Afterward, said Marin, “Laura was really shook up. But she wouldn’t say what happened.”
Laura had vanished the night of October 31, 1974, and Marin had a totally new version of what happened that night—different from the conclusions which the Utah County sheriff’s office had recorded in its case reports. Laura, Marin, and several other teenagers had gathered at Marin’s home for a Halloween party. The boys had brought an abundance of vodka, and Laura had had a lot to drink. “It was about midnight or so, and she was pretty well drunk,” said Marin. “And she wanted me to walk downtown with her to get some cigarettes.” Marin declined. But, she said, she watched as Laura began to walk in the darkness, toward Brown’s, the all-night restaurant, one block away.
That was the last she saw of Laura. “Around three or four o’clock some of us went to town to look for her,” said Marin, “but we couldn’t find her.”
When shown a photo lineup, Marin chose the picture of Ted Bundy.
“Will you take a polygraph test—that’s a lie detector—to verify what you’ve told us?” asked Bullock. Marin agreed. She passed the test.
A woman employee of Brown’s Café made a similar identification.
Bullock calculated it. From Brown’s Café on Lehi’s main street, it was a quick drive along old highway 89 to American Fork and there, after passing the business district, a left turn would have put the killer and Laura on an easy, quick route to the American Fork canyon where her body had been found.
Bullock’s findings were exciting, encouraging news to Fisher.
“Y’know,” said Fisher, “there’s always been something about that Aime case—that one in particular—that’s bothered Theodore.” When several case files were given to Bundy in his jail cell, under the discovery procedure, said Fisher, “the first one he went for—and he really tore into it—was the Aime case.”
Together Bullock and Fisher were developing a strange theory. “Maybe,” guessed Fisher, “our man departed from his usual MO just once. In every other case, the victim became a victim because she had never had any contact with Bundy. Maybe this was the one time where there had been some previous contact with the victim.”
The time frame was right, the investigators noted. The sightings of the man with the Volkswagen had been in late September and during October 1974—a time of stress for Bundy, when he was skipping his law school classes and running up miles on his Volkswagen.
For weeks, Fisher tried in vain to get Sheriff Holley to provide the evidence gathered at the Aime crime scene and autopsy—especially the specimens of head hair and pubic hair taken at the autopsy. In frustration, Fisher eventually called Bullock. “Brent,” said the investigator at Aspen, “we can’t get any response from the sheriff there. We keep getting told it’ll be sent but we never get the stuff.”
“Mike,” replied the Provo investigator, “I got this eerie feeling that the sheriff may have lost the evidence.”
“Oh, Christ,” sighed Fisher. “That’s all we need. ... Here we are with a whole bunch of new hair vacuumed out of that goddamn Volkswagen. And we need a sample from Aime for comparison. And those SOB’s lost it?”
In October 1977, Randy Ripplinger, Provo bureau chief for Salt Lake City’s KUTV, dropped a bombshell on the station’s nightly newscast. The Utah County sheriff’s department, he reported, had lost or thrown away some or all of the evidence it had collected in the Laura Aime murder investigation less than three years earlier.
In his telecast, Ripplinger reported that at least two sources within the sheriff’s department had confirmed the loss which had occurred while the sheriff’s people were moving into a new office. The television newsman quoted one of the sheriff’s officers as saying, “‘To be quite frank, I believe I threw it out. I got tired of moving it around.’”
Next day, an irate Sheriff Holley, sensing political troubles, confronted the county attorney and his investigator, demanding to know who leaked the information to Ripplinger.
“Mack,” asked Bullock levelly, “is the evidence lost?”
The sheriff had a lame reply. It wasn’t really evidence—it would have become evidence only when admitted in a trial. But, yes, he acknowledged, Laura Aime’s hair specimens and other trace evidence collected at the autopsy and at the crime scene were gone.
* * *
For nearly three years, his frustration had continued to eat within Jim Aime. In the Aime’s century-old, weathered farmhouse, outside the town of American Fork near Provo, Laura’s father sat brooding at the kitchen table. And for perhaps the five-thousandth time, he cursed and banged his fist on the table top. “Dammit,” he exclaimed, “it’s bad enough to have your daughter murdered, but to think that those goddamn cops don’t know what the hell they’re doing ... or they don’t care ...”
Standing nearby, idly wiping the top of the kitchen range, Shirleen Aime agreed in a dry voice: “Well, they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Never, in all the weeks following their daughter’s murder, did the Aimes believe that the sheriff’s office had investigated the case thoroughly enough. Sheriff Holley said he didn’t have the manpower to assign anyone full time to the investigation. The Aimes had pleaded with Holley to allow Salt Lake County detectives to enter the case. They were capable and anxious to help. But Holley had refused the outside help, Bullock told the Aimes.
“Brent Bullock’s the only one who seems to know what the hell he’s doing,” said Jim. “But what can he do when the sheriff won’t help?”
It was almost the third anniversary of Laura’s murder, and her parents were in for another shock. When Brent Bullock came to visit them, he explained he was heavy-hearted. “I’ve got something really difficult to ask. Can we sit down?”
Jim and Shirleen nodded toward the kitchen table, where they all sat down together. Bullock explained to the parents that, in Colorado, there was an important hearing coming up in the murder trial of Ted Bundy. The Aimes nodded. They knew all about Bundy’s trial there. The Aimes had absorbed every bit of information they could about the man they strongly suspected had killed their daughter. He haunted their lives. Shirleen had once gone to the Salt Lake County courthouse to view Bundy in the courtroom. From a cousin who lived in Bountiful, Shirleen had learned that police there were ready to charge Bundy with the murder of Debbie Kent, except that Debbie’s body had never been found. So Shirleen had sought training in psychic methods, placed herself in a trance, and had spent hours searching the mountains near Bountiful, looking for the remains of Debbie, another mother’s murdered daughter.
“Yes, we know all about it,” said Shirleen.
Bullock told them how the Colorado prosecution was trying to relate Laura’s murder to the Colorado case. “Now they’ve vacuumed some more hair out of Bundy’s Volkswagen,” said Bullock. “And they’d like to make some comparisons, to see if one of those hairs might match Laura’s.”
Bullock gulped and issued a deep sigh. He saw that the Aimes anticipated what was coming. They had heard the rumors that Sheriff Holley’s office had lost all the evidence, including the hair samples which had been taken from Laura.
“So we need a sample of hair,” Bullock continued. “And that means we’re going to have to ask you if Laura’s body could be exhumed. Now the odds are less than fifty-fifty that they’ll find a match, but ...”
Tears welled in the eyes of the mother and father as they exchanged glances. There was agreement.
“Oh, God, God,” whimpered Jim Aime, elbows propped on the table, his rugged hands clutched to his forehead. Tears again poured onto his lined cheeks. “You might as well go ahead. They can’t hurt her any more than she’s already been hurt.”