EVIDENCE SPECIALISTS

Tonya Yzaguerre, Cheryl Rivers, Terry McAdam, George Johnston, Chesterine Cwiklik, Jean Johnston, Beverly Himick; Skip Palenik, microscopist, Microtrace; Marc Church; Kirsten Maitland.

OTHER POLICE JURISDICTIONS

Investigators from Washington State: Des Moines Police Department, Tukwila Police Department, Kent Police Department, Thurston County Sheriff’s Department, Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department, Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, Tacoma Police Department, Spokane Police Department.

Oregon: Portland Police Department, Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, Washington County Sheriff’s Office, Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office.

California: San Diego Sheriff’s Department, San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, San Francisco Police Department, Sacramento Police Department.

Nevada: Las Vegas Police Department.

MEDICAL EXAMINERS

Dr. Donald Reay, Medical Examiner, King County; Bill Haglund, Ph.D., Chief Investigator, King County Medical Examiner’s Office; Dr. Larry Lewman, Oregon State Medical Examiner.

THE PROSECUTORS

Norm Maleng, King County Prosecutor; Marilyn Brenneman, Al Matthews, Jeff Baird, Bryan McDonald, Ian Goodhew, Patricia Eakes, Sean O’Donnell.

THE DEFENSE TEAM

Tony Savage, Mark Prothero, Fred Leatherman, David Roberson, Suzanne Elliott, Todd Gruenhagen, James Robinson.

INTERESTED OBSERVERS

Barbara Kubik-Patten, psychic; Melvyn Foster, unofficial consultant; Cookie Hunt, spokesperson for the Women’s Coalition; Dale Wells, public defender in Spokane.

TASK FORCE CONSULTANTS

Pierce Brooks, former Homicide captain, Los Angeles Police Department, former police chief in Lakewood, Colorado, and Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, serial murder expert; Robert Keppel, Ph.D., serial murder expert; Dr. John Berberich, psychologist; Chuck Wright, Washington State Corrections probation and parole supervisor; Dr. Chris Harris, forensic psychiatrist; Dr. Robert Wheeler, psychologist; Betty Pat Gatliff, forensic artist; Dr. Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist; Linda Barker, victims’ advocate; Prof. Fio Ugolini, soil scientist; Dee Botkin, phlebotomist.

F.B.I. special agents: John Douglas; Dr. Mary Ellen O’Toole, Behavioral Science Unit; Gerald “Duke” Dietrich, Paul Lindsay, Walt LaMar, Tom Torkilsen, John Gambersky, Ralph Hope, Bob Agnew.

Introduction

AS I BEGAN this most horrifying of all books in my long career as a true-crime writer, I found myself faced with the same dilemma I encountered some twenty-five years ago. In the early 1970s, I worked as a volunteer at the Crisis Clinic in Seattle, Washington. Two nights a week, I worked an all-night shift with a young male psychology student at the University of Washington as my partner. Together we fielded calls from suicidal and distraught people. I hadn’t published a book yet, but by 1975 I had a contract to write one if the nameless killer of at least seven young coeds in Washington and Oregon was ever caught. As many readers know, that murderer turned out to be my partner: Ted Bundy. By the time I learned that, however, he had left the Northwest and continued his murderous rampage in Utah, Idaho, and Colorado. Convicted of attempted kidnapping in Utah, Ted was extradited to Colorado in 1976 to await his murder trials for eight victims in that state, but he escaped from two jails, making his way to Florida after his second—successful—escape on New Year’s Eve, 1977. There he took the lives of three more young women and left another three for dead in Tallahassee and Jacksonville before he was finally arrested, convicted of murder in two trials, and sentenced to death. After nine years of appeals, Ted was electrocuted on January 24, 1989, at Raiford Prison.

How many women did Ted Bundy kill? No one really knows for sure, but when Florida detectives told him that the F.B.I. believed his toll was thirty-six victims, he said, “Add one digit to that, and you’ll have it.” Only he knew if he meant 37, 136, or 360.

Throughout his years of imprisonment, Ted wrote dozens of letters to me, and sometimes made oblique statements that could be construed as partial confessions.

Initially, I tried to write the Ted Bundy saga as if I were only an observer, and no part of the story. It didn’t work because I had been part of the story, so after two hundred pages, I started over on The Stranger Beside Me. There were times when I had to drop in and out of the scenario with memories and connections that seemed relevant. Stranger was my first book; this is my twenty-third. Once again, I have found myself part of the story, more than I would choose to be in some instances. Many of the men and women who investigated these cases are longtime friends. I have taught seminars at law enforcement conferences with some of them and worked beside others on various task forces, although I am no longer a police officer. I have known them as human beings who faced an almost incomprehensible task and somehow stood up to it and, in the end, won. And I have known them when they were relaxed and having a good time at my house or theirs, setting aside for a short while the frustrations, disappointments, and tragedies with which they had to deal.

Was I privy to secret information? Only rarely. I didn’t ask questions that I knew they couldn’t answer. What I did learn I kept to myself until the time came when it could be revealed without negatively impacting the investigation.

So, the twenty-two-year quest to find, arrest, convict, and sentence the man who is, perhaps, the most prolific serial killer in history has been part of my life, too. It all began so close to where I lived and brought up my children. This time, I didn’t know the killer, but he, apparently, knew me, read my books about true homicide cases, and was sometimes so close that I could have reached out and touched him. As it turned out, varying degrees of connection also existed between his victims and people close to me, but I would learn that only in retrospect.

There were moments over the years when I was convinced that this unknown personification of evil had to appear so normal, so bland, that he could have stood behind me in the supermarket checkout line, or eaten dinner in the restaurant booth next to mine.

He did. And he had.

Looking back now, I wonder why I cut a particular article out of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It wasn’t headline news, and it was so brief that it would have been easy to miss. By the summer of 1982, I had moved on from covering six to eight homicide cases for True Detective and four other fact-detective magazines every month and was concentrating on writing books. I was under contract to do a novel at the time and I wasn’t even looking for true-crime cases to write about. But the short item in the “Local News” section was very sad: Two young boys had found the body of a young woman snagged on pilings under the Peck Bridge on Meeker Street in Kent, Washington. She had floated in the shallows of the Green River, her arms and legs entangled in a rope or some similar bonds.