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Copyright © 1980 by Anne Rule Afterword copyright © 1986 by Anne Rule. All rights reserved. For information address
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This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published by W. W. Norton and Company, Inc
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE
For legal reasons, some of the names in this book have been changed.
This book is dedicated to my parents:
Sophie Hansen Stackhouse and
the late Chester R. Stackhouse ...
for their unfailing love and support,
and because they always believed.. . «
Acknowledgment
I have been fortunate indeed to have had the support of many individuals and organizations in writing this book. Without their help and emotional backing, it would have been impossible, and I would like to thank them: The Committee of Friends and Families of Victims of Violent Crimes and Missing Persons; the Seattle Police Department Crimes Against Persons Unit; the King County Police Department Major Crimes Unit; former Sheriff Don Redmond of Thurston County; Lieutenant James Stovall of the Salem, Oregon Police Department; Gene Miller of the Miami Herald; George Thurston of the Washington Post; Tony Polk of the Rocky Mountain News; Rick Barry of the Tampa Tribune; Albert Govoni, editor of True Detective; Jack Olsen; Yvonne E.W. Smith; Amelia Mills; Maureen and Bill Woodcock; Dr. Peter J. Modde, and my children, Laura, Leslie, Andy and Mike, who gave up months of their mother's companionship so that I might write.
And tortures him now more, the more he sees Of pleasure not for him ordained: then soon Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites:
"Thoughts, whither have ye led me? with what sweet Compulsion thus transported to forget
What hither brought us? hate, not love, nor hope
Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste
Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying; other joy
To me is lost...."
Paradise Lost: Book IX (Lines 469-79)
Preface
I
This book began a half dozen years ago as an entirely different work. It was to have been a crime reporter's chronicling of a series of inexplicable murders of beautiful young women. By its very nature, it was to have been detached, the result of extensive research. My life, certainly, would be no part of it. It has evolved instead into an intensely personal book, the story of a unique friendship that has somehow transcended the facts that my research produced. As the years passed, I learned that the stranger at the very vortex of an ever-spreading police probe was not a stranger at all; he was my friend. To write a book about an anonymous murder suspect is one thing. To write such a book about someone you have known and cared for for ten years is quite another. And yet, that is exactly what has happened. My contract to write this book was signed many months before Ted Bundy became the prime suspect in more than a dozen homicide cases. My book would not be about a faceless name hi a newspaper, about one unknown out of the over one million people who live in the Seattle area; it would be about my friend, Ted Bundy.
We might never have met at all. Logically, statistically, demographically, the chance that Ted Bundy and I should meet and become fast friends is almost too obscure to contemplate. We have lived in the same states at the same timenot once but many times-but the fifteen years between our ages precluded our meeting for many years. When we did meet in 1971, I was a plumpish mother of four, almost forty, nearing divorce. Ted was twenty-four, a brilliant, handsome senior in psychology at the University of Washington. Chanfce made us partners on the crisis lines at Seattle's Crisis Clinic on the Tuesday night late shift. Rapport, an almost instant rapport, made us friends. I was a volunteer on the phones, and Ted earned two dollars an hour as a work-study student. He looked forward to
XIV
PREFACE
law school, and I hoped that my fledgling career as a freelance writer might grow into something that would provide a fulltime income for my family. Although I had a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Washington, I had done little writing until 1968 when I'd become the Northwest correspondent for True Detective Magazine and her sister publications, all specializing in fact-detective stories. My beat was major crime stories in a territory extending from Eugene, Oregon to the Canadian border.