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In Utah, in early November 1977, almost exactly three years after they happened, the murders of Laura Aime and Melissa Smith and the disappearance of Debbie Kent were being intensively reinvestigated by the men from Colorado.
At Aspen, Judge George Lohr was considering Prosecutor Milt Blakey’s argument that there were similar threads of circumstance which ran through those crimes and the Carol DaRonch kidnapping, “which, taken altogether, comprise a common fabric, a pattern of conduct,” and that included Caryn Campbell’s murder. And interwoven with it all was Ted Bundy.
On November 3, Blakey, in a closed-door hearing in Judge Lohr’s chambers, had made an offer of proof on that argument. Bundy, now being assisted by Aspen attorney Kevin O’Reilly, argued vehemently. “The dissimilarities of all these transactions,” Ted said, “are just overwhelming.”
Hours later, Blakey, Mike Fisher, and George Vahsholtz, the district attorney’s investigator from Colorado, were scurrying from place to place in Utah, interviewing witnesses.
“All we’ve got to do,” Blakey wryly told Fisher and Vahsholtz, “is solve three unsolved murders to bolster our own case.”
At Bountiful, local police opened their files on the Debbie Kent case to Fisher and Vahsholtz who went through the investigation records and began reinterviewing witnesses who had known Debbie or who had been at Viewmont High School, November 8, 1974, the night she left the auditorium and vanished.
In the Bountiful police station, Tammy Tingy, a short, black-haired, black-eyed Indian girl, gave some startling information to Fisher. She told him that, the night Debbie disappeared, “I talked with the weird guy who was standing there in the back of the auditorium.”
“How close were you to him?” asked Fisher.
“Right next to him,” she replied. Tammy, although a shy girl, was certain. In October 1975, she had sat in the police lineup room at Salt Lake City and had chosen Bundy as the man she’d seen that night. But in subsequent police questioning, the subdued Tammy had been questioned less extensively than had been the Viewmont High School teacher, Raylene Shepherd.
“Then when he walked forward, from the back wall of the auditorium up to the brick divider,” Tammy continued, “I walked up there, too, and stood next to him.”
“From where you were standing, could you—and the man—see Debbie?” asked Fisher.
“Oh, sure. She was sitting just a couple rows in front of us.”
“Tammy, would you draw a diagram for me, to show where you were ... where the guy was and where Debbie was sitting?”
The Indian girl obliged. A terrific witness, thought Fisher. With thoughtful, deliberate confidence, she placed Ted Bundy, standing, watching, fifteen feet behind Debbie Kent just before that moment when Debbie rose to leave the auditorium.
“And did you know Debbie pretty well?” Fisher asked.
“We were locker partners all through high school,” Tammy replied firmly. “She was my friend.”
Fisher emphasized to Tammy it was important that she be sure of what she was saying, especially her identification of Ted Bundy as the man who stood beside her that evening.
The young woman’s response was quiet, emphatic: “God knows I’m right.”
Fisher’s mournful blue eyes studied her earnest face. “Thank you, Tammy,” he said.
Afterward, Fisher and Vahsholtz began tracking down another young woman who had been at the high school that night—a girl who had been approached by a man in the parking lot. “She reported at the time the guy came over to her at her car and asked her to come help him hold something on the engine of his car so he could get it started,” said Vahsholtz. “She wouldn’t go with him.”
“Sounds like our boy’s MO,” observed Fisher.
But, noted Vahsholtz, “she says this guy was wearing glasses.”
“And we’ve never had Bundy wearing glasses,” mused Fisher with a shrug. “Huh!”
That night, by telephone, Vahsholtz reached the woman, now a student at Utah State University in Logan. She confirmed that report and gave a description of the man, which matched Bundy. But she insisted the man in the parking lot that night had been wearing glasses—“with lenses that had kind of a graduated tint.”
“Well, maybe I should make a run up to Logan to talk to her anyway,” said Fisher.
Over breakfast next morning at the Tri-Arcs Travelodge in Salt Lake City, Blakey, Fisher, and Vahsholtz were talking over details of their simultaneous reinvestigations—at Provo in the Laura Aime case, at Salt Lake City in the Smith murder and DaRonch kidnapping, and at Bountiful.
An attractive, well-dressed young woman had joined them for breakfast—Judith Strachan, the young woman who had occupied an apartment near Bundy’s on The Avenues. She had been a close friend of Bundy and had provided much background information to Fisher and the other investigators. She had come to have deep suspicions of Bundy.
“How’s everything going for you?” asked Fisher, opening idle conversation. “Oh, fine,” she replied. During breakfast they continued their small talk. Opposite them, Blakey was talking business with Vahsholtz, figuring how to deploy their lone rental car that day. “And Mike,” said Blakey, “needs to get up to Logan to talk with the girl about the guy with the glasses.”
“Oh, glasses,” said Judith. “That reminds me! Did I ever tell you about the glasses?”
“No,” said Fisher, taking a bite of hotcake, “what glasses?”
“Well,” replied the young woman, “Ted always had a couple pairs of glasses which he used to wear once in a while.”
Fisher choked on his hotcake. Startled, Blakey dropped a cup, clattering onto the saucer, spilling his coffee. “Tell us about the glasses,” said Fisher, still choking.
“Well,” she began, “he had one pair, black rimmed, with just plain glass lenses, which he called his lawyer glasses. Then there was this other pair. They had kind of shaded, tinted lenses. Ted said he wore those because they made him look cool.”
Fisher finally managed to swallow. He, Blakey, and Vahsholtz exchanged stares. “So Theodore did have some glasses,” he muttered.
“And shaded, tinted lenses,” Vahsholtz added. “We better talk to the young lady at Logan.”
* * *
Later that day, in a mood of triumph, the Colorado men and Brent Bullock, the Utah County investigator, began a jubilant conversation over cocktails in the Thirteenth Floor, the dimly lighted lounge of the high-rise Travelodge.
“I think we’ve got somethin’ going at last,” enthused Fisher. After weeks of work, he had solidified the facts of the Melissa Smith murder, tying in similarities to the Caryn Campbell murder. And now, new witnesses, new breakthroughs in the Debbie Kent case.
“Hell,” said Bullock, “if Debbie’s body could ever be found, we’d have a case there.”
The others nodded. “Any word yet on the Aime hair samples?” asked Blakey.
“No, I’m afraid it’ll be a while,” replied Bullock.
After the recent exhumation of the body, Bullock explained, Laura’s hair specimens had been sped to the FBI lab. “They promised to put a ‘rush’ on it, but nothing so far.”
Bullock had become an active part of the Colorado team putting together the Bundy prosecution there. “Y’ know, I’ve worked on the Laura Aime case for so long, I feel like I’m married to it,” said the hefty investigator. “I dunno if I’ll ever get Laura—or Bundy—out of my belly.”
“Guess we all feel that way,” sighed Fisher. “Lotta incredible effort’s gone into all this.” Fisher and Bullock, in fact, had recently flown to Toronto to interrogate a former Salt Lake City friend of Bundy, to check one witness’s statement that Bundy and that friend had been together once at Brown’s Café at Lehi, where Laura Aime had been. They’d struck out. Bundy’s friend denied ever being in Lehi. “Lotta goddamn frustrations,” Fisher reflected, “but maybe our luck is finally turning.”
As they ordered another round of drinks, Blakey excused himself to find a telephone. “I’ve got to return a call from my office,” he said.
“This little Tammy Tingy,” Fisher told Bullock, “is just a fantastic witness. A quiet little gal, kinda plump, soft-spoken, and dead serious. Put her on the witness stand, and she’d be just powerful.”
“Great,” said Bullock. “Damn, I’d like to get Bundy put away. Maybe we’re on the way.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Fisher. When the three investigators raised their glasses in a toast, Blakey returned to the table.
His somber expression erased the mood.
“Guys,” said Blakey, “I hate to throw a damper on the party. ...”
“What happened?” asked Bullock.
“I just got the message. Judge Lohr threw us out on the similar transactions in the Aime and Kent cases. We’re through.”
The investigators froze. Their months of work had all been in vain.
“Sorry, guys,” Blakey told Fisher and Vahsholtz. “But I guess we pack our bags and head home.”
At a table in a far corner of the lounge, some drunks were singing a raucous, happy song. “Looks kind of peculiar,” sighed Bullock, “for us to be sitting over here sobbing.”
* * *
At Glenwood Springs, in his jail cell cluttered with files and books, Bundy was jubilant. “You know,” he told me in a telephone conversation, “I wrote the briefs on the Kent and Aime transactions! And I think anyone would have to admit they were damned good legal arguments.
“I’m feeling very good about the case,” he went on. He predicted that Judge Lohr would also throw out the state’s effort to bring in the Melissa Smith murder as a similar transaction.
“So now,” said Ted, “we’ve got the hearing November fourteenth on the motion to suppress the other Utah matters.” That would be the final pretrial hearing—an effort by Bundy, helped by his advisory lawyers, to block the admissibility of Utah testimony about his August 15, 1975, arrest and his subsequent conviction of kidnapping.
Meanwhile, with the state’s case badly weakened, Blakey was confiding privately, “The best thing we’ve got going for us now is Ted Bundy.” The thoughtful prosecutor, along with Fisher, had studiously examined Bundy’s background and watched his appearances in court. “As long as he’s functioning as a lawyer, everything’s real cool with Ted,” Blakey observed. “Then when something reminds him that he’s the prisoner, you sense these flashes of anger, hostility. He’s always got to be the superstar. But he’s only good in the first quarter of whatever game he’s in. Then something happens.”
“Something’s gonna blow. Something’s gonna happen,” agreed Fisher. “I gotta feelin’.”
In mid-November, the Utah witnesses—principals in Bundy’s conviction at Salt Lake City—began appearing in the Aspen courtroom. Among his other avenues of attack, Bundy sought to show that his Volkswagen had been illegally searched the night Bob Hayward arrested him and that his credit-card slip and the Colorado ski brochure—the items which triggered the Colorado investigation—had been taken unlawfully during the search of his apartment.
But personally Ted Bundy, acting as his own counsel, was most anxious to have his crack at questioning his nemesis—Carol DaRonch.
That morning, watching Ted in the courtroom, his hair long and his beard again fully grown, ankle irons visible beneath the cuffs of his jail coveralls, I made a marginal note on my legal pad: “Ted looks more disheveled today.” He was awaiting Carol DaRonch’s appearance on the stand.
During the midmorning recess that day, Ted, with a sudden movement, began to approach the prosecution table to examine a document. Don Davis, a strapping deputy sheriff, gruffly ordered him back. Ted erupted in anger and turned toward the guards. There was an instant of scuffling. Crisp sounds of leather, bodies colliding. Three guards grabbed Bundy and swept him out of the courtroom and down the stairs to the jail.
“They whipped him down three flights of stairs and his feet didn’t touch one goddamn stair,” said a courthouse worker who’d watched it. “And Bundy’s face was pure fury.”
Court was delayed for more than an hour, as they left Ted in a cell to cool off. Alone, he mischievously tucked one link of his leg chain into the crack of an open steel door. When he swung the heavy door, it snapped the chain. He was grinning when guards applied new leg chains.
When court resumed that afternoon, Ted Bundy, the counsel, stood at a lectern, smiling, seemingly composed, and began his questioning of Carol DaRonch. “I’ll ask you to please relax,” he told the slim brunette woman, now a twenty-year-old. “There’s nothing more that can occur between us right now.”
It became a long, slow, deliberate question-answer replay of all the events that night of November 8, 1974—Carol’s stroll through the Fashion Mall, the subsequent attack in the Volkswagen, her eventual identification of Bundy in the Salt Lake City police lineup.
“Did you identify me at that lineup?” asked Bundy.
“Yes.”
“Will you please describe what I looked like.”
“I don’t remember exactly,” Carol said softly.
“Be very careful here. ‘I don’t remember’ is not an excuse for not answering a question. ... Could you have recognized me in that lineup from seeing my pictures?”
“I don’t know.”
Judge Lohr’s quizzical eyes watched Bundy, in jail coveralls, asking the questions, with his occasional tense smile, and the nervous, soft-voiced girl as she replied.
After more than two hours, it came to an end. “You’re not sure about who your abductor is,” said Bundy in a statement-question.
“Yes, I am,” the young woman said. Carol, level and calm, directed a stare at Bundy. “You can’t change your face.”
Bundy stared back at her. Coldly, slowly he said, “Miss DaRonch, I feel very sorry for you. But you’ve made a mistake.”
Blakey objected. Judge Lohr sustained. The statement was stricken from the record.
* * *
Later, as we visited again in the jail at Glenwood Springs, Ted reflected buoyantly on the significance of what had occurred during the hearings. “Prosecutors won’t be able to bring in the Melissa Smith murder as similar transaction,” Ted went on. “Where is the similarity? I defy anyone to find a common uniqueness between the two. ... The only case where we have detailed operation of the MO is DaRonch. In the Smith transaction nothing is known as to how she disappeared, what the method of death was. So we know what happened to DaRonch. We don’t know what happened to Smith. There’s just nothing.”
“Ted,” I asked, “how’d it feel to be questioning Carol DaRonch?”
He grinned boyishly. His reply was an analysis of Carol. “I thought Carol was fairly relaxed under the circumstances. I did my best to be charming as I could. I enjoyed it—the opportunity to speak to her again.”
“And what in hell was that fracas all about—that uproar with the guards?”
Ted laughed. “Well, it was just a minor conflict.” He said he’d merely been walking toward the district attorney. “I was doing legitimate work.” Then his expression turned cold as he talked about the guards. He was fed up with the tight security he said, the restraints on him. “I’m not going to do what the man tells me to do.”
Ted explained how he’d been able to break the leg chains after they’d tossed him in the basement jail.
And, he chuckled again, “I could have made it very dramatic, you know.” After snapping the ankle chain when no one was there, “I could have used a paper clip to put the chain back together again.” Then, when he was back in the courtroom, getting hostile testimony from Carol DaRonch, “I could say, ‘That makes me MAD!’”—and he demonstrated for me, grabbing the steel chain and theatrically snapping it with his bare hands.
We shared another laugh. It would have been great show biz, I told him.
* * *
As the end of 1977 approached, Bundy’s legal position was strengthened. The Melissa Smith murder had also been ruled out by Judge Lohr as a “similar transaction.”
Despite the advice of his Aspen lawyer, O’Reilly, Ted was determined to seek a change of venue. Aspen, with its liberal, easygoing social attitudes, O’Reilly told him, was “probably the best place in the whole state of Colorado to go to trial.”
But Bundy was stubbornly determined. “I want to get a public-opinion survey of Aspen,” he had said, “to see how much they know about Ted Bundy, to see what the mood is.” In Seattle, his friends began raising money to finance such a survey, asking for contributions of fifty dollars or more. The survey never got started. Ted filed his motion for a change of venue.
During the hearing in the courtroom that Tuesday before Christmas 1977, Judge Lohr announced he would grant the motion. Ted’s face brightened with triumph. Beside him, Kevin O’Reilly sighed inwardly. O’Reilly sensed Bundy was making a colossal error.
After a brief recess, Judge Lohr returned to the bench to announce that arrangements already had been made for Ted Bundy’s murder trial to commence in its new location: January 9, 1978, in El Paso County.
Bundy looked puzzled. “Where’s El Paso County?” he asked O’Reilly.
“The Springs, you dumb shit,” snapped O’Reilly in a stage whisper.
Colorado Springs. Of all the places in Colorado a defense lawyer didn’t want a murder case tried, it was Colorado Springs. At that moment five men were on Death Row in the Colorado prison. Four of them had come from courts in Colorado Springs.
And, Ted knew, Colorado Springs was the home base of his prosecutors, Blakey and Russel.
Ashen-faced, trembling, Bundy leaped to his feet. His guards took a step toward him. Stabbing an angry gesture toward Judge Lohr, Bundy shouted, “You’re sentencing me to death!”
The judge ignored the remark. Seething, Bundy was returned, handcuffed, in leg irons, in the sheriff’s car back to the jail at Glenwood Springs.
“He’s boilin’,” noted Fisher. “They’d goddamn sure better watch him now.” Blakey began plans to have Bundy transferred from the Garfield County jail to the county jail at Colorado Springs some time after the holiday season—probably January 3 or 4.
* * *
When Ted and I next talked by telephone, on December 28, I asked him about his angry outburst in the court. He laughed it off. “What’s so tough about Colorado Springs?” I asked.
“I guess it is true that Colorado Springs is probably the easiest place in the state to death-qualify a jury.” Ted said he’d learned the Springs had a fairly heavy military population, a high concentration of middle-income working-class residents, and generally a strong law-and-order feeling. “It is more conservative, shall we say, than other parts of the state.”
Ted had some good news that day. Judge Lohr had ruled in favor of the defense argument. Colorado’s death-penalty statute, the judge held, was unconstitutional. “I’m hoping that the Supreme Court will review that before we go to trial,” Ted told me. That could mean months of delay before trial.
We talked about his Christmas. “No big deal,” said Ted. “We had only one other prisoner here in the jail. It was real quiet.” Ted said he’d been losing weight. We talked about Seattle happenings. “Of course the big excitement here,” I told him, “is the Rose Bowl game. I suppose you’ll watch it on TV.”
There was a pause. Ted had no reply. “You know,” I told him, “your old alma mater [the University of Washington] plays Michigan in the Rose Bowl.”
Still Ted was silent. It hadn’t seemed to register with him. Washington versus Michigan in the Rose Bowl January 2 would, I thought, be something Ted would really be looking forward to. “Will you have a chance to see it on TV?” I asked.
“Oh, the Rose Bowl game,” Ted replied. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose I’ll see it.” I thought there was a strange vagueness in his voice.
What I didn’t realize was that Ted’s phone call that day was his “good-bye” conversation with me. He didn’t plan on being in jail when the Rose Bowl game was played.
* * *
For weeks, Ted had been planning the escape. A steel plate above the light fixture in the ceiling of his steel cell, he discovered, had been imperfectly welded. It was loose. By prying and some hacksawing (carefully done when there were other loud jail noises, especially the kitchen clatter during meals preparation), he had fully loosened the fixture and the plate. When they were pushed upward, Ted had a foot-square hole in the ceiling. Ted’s dieting had taken his weight down to a slim 150 pounds. He was thin enough to wriggle through that hole.
Above the ceiling, Ted made test explorations during the nights preceding his actual escape. Hoisting himself, scraping his hips, twisting his body upward through the hole, he emerged in the pinched attic space above, beneath the flat roof of the one-story building.
There, crawling in the darkness and dust—stifling his need to sneeze—Ted had looked for a way out. Once he almost crawled onto a wobbling section of plasterboard, through which he could have crashed into the jail kitchen. One night, by chance, he noticed a shaft of light in the attic. Below, in a jailer’s apartment, someone had opened a door to a closet. Ted had discovered his eventual exit.
That afternoon, December 30, Frank Perry, an elderly guard, talked with Ted in his cell. “I’m not feeling too well,” Ted told him. Later that evening, Perry looked through the window of the cell door and saw the prisoner sitting on his bunk, reading. Next morning Perry knocked on the cell door, to offer breakfast. There was no response. Through the window it appeared Bundy was still asleep. It was nearly noon when the discovery was made. Beneath the blanket, mounded to resemble a human body, were books, papers, and clothing. Ted Bundy was gone.
All hell broke loose. Police radios broadcast the alarm. A police dragnet was set up around the whole Rocky Mountain area. Fury came down on the Garfield County officers, especially Sheriff Ed Hogue.
“We’re just sick about it,” said the forlorn Hogue. “We knew that the steel box up above that light fixture in the cell was loose. We’d been trying to get a welder in to fix it. I kept asking the county commissioners for a surveillance system, with television and all, so the guards could keep an eye on all parts of the jail. But they said they didn’t have the budget for it.”
Undersheriff Bob Hart was issuing information about the escape to other law-enforcement agencies and the news media that Saturday. “We know Bundy probably got out of the jail sometime after eight-thirty this morning,” Hart said. He explained it appeared that Bundy had crawled across the attic, then broken through the plasterboard downward into a closet of the guard’s apartment. “The guard and his wife had gone out shoppin’ for groceries,” said Hart. “Bundy’d probably been layin’ up there listenin’ for them to go out. Then he went. We think he had about seven dollars on ’im.
“Everything in that closet was okay around eight o’clock or so,” Hart continued. “Near noon, they came back and found the closet all torn up.”
It was erroneous information.
At midday, Saturday, December 31, while police hurriedly set up roadblocks, while the first frantic alarms were being broadcast, Ted Bundy was in Chicago.
* * *
“Theodore really set ’em up in that jail,” grumbled Fisher. Despite all the reminders that he was a constant escape risk, Ted had made friends with the Garfield County jail guards, had observed their movements, and learned, through friendly chitchat, that just one elderly guard would be on duty that New Year’s weekend. “And he knew,” added Fisher, “that within about three or four days, he was gonna be transferred to Colorado Springs. He had his plan. Time was running out. So he went.
“Funny thing,” Fisher went on, “Theodore had everything goin’ his way in the case. All the similars were being tossed out. I didn’t think we’d ever get the Utah evidence in. It turned out we never made a match on Laura Aime’s hair. He was winnin’ everythin’ in sight.”
“Where do you guess he’s gone?” I asked.
“Well, my guess would be north. To Canada. There’s a lot of places up there where they have kind of American communes—gathering places for the guys who ran from the draft ... Ted would fit in really well there.”
“I dunno,” I replied. “There’s a really mean winter storm all across the Midwest right now. Colder’n hell. I doubt he’d head that far north.”
“He might go south, but I don’t think he’d go to Mexico,” said Fisher. “Too much of a cultural change.”
On January 3, at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Police Officer Bob Campbell was served with a subpoena from Colorado. Issued one week earlier and delivered to Campbell’s home by a local officer, the subpoena ordered him to appear at Colorado Springs to testify in the trial of Theodore Robert Bundy for the murder of Bob’s sister, Caryn Campbell. “Forget it,” snapped Campbell. “I hear those jerks out there let him escape.”
The FBI had entered the case on the presumption Bundy had become an interstate fugitive. Police in Colorado and Utah were pleading to have him placed on the Ten Most Wanted list (an action which finally came on February 10). Dave Yates, the FBI agent at Glenwood Springs, telephoned me that first week of January. He was interviewing all of Bundy’s friends and acquaintances, asking for information or hunches about Bundy’s whereabouts.
“Where do you think he might be?” Yates asked.
“I really have no idea,” I replied. “At first I thought he might head for Southern California—LA, maybe. But then, of course, LA’s hot with police activity right now, with the Hillside Strangler down there. Ted knows that.”
Yates agreed. We talked about Ted’s supply of money. Officials at the Garfield County jail still were reporting he had only about seven dollars with him when he escaped.
“So,” I said, “I’d guess Ted would have to hole up somewhere, get a job and pick up some money. If he hitched a ride to Denver, I’d start looking around Denver University, maybe around the edge of the campus there.
‘‘Ted,” I told the FBI man, “really likes being around the edge of a campus.”