Louise joined the Methodist Church, and there at a social function she met Johnnie Culpepper Bundy—one of a huge clan of Bundys who reside in the Tacoma area. Bundy, a cook, was as tiny as Louise, neither of them standing an inch over five feet. He was shy, but he seemed kind. He seemed solid.
It was a rapid courtship, marked principally by attendance at other social functions at the church. On May 19, 1951, Louise Cowell married Johnnie Bundy. Ted attended the wedding of his “older sister” and the little cook from the army base. He was not yet five when he had a third name: Theodore Robert Bundy.
Louise continued working as a secretary and the new family moved several times before finally buying their own home near the soaring Narrows Bridge.
Soon, there were four half-siblings, two girls and two boys. The youngest boy, born when Ted was fifteen, was his favorite. Ted was often pressed into babysitting chores, and his teenage friends recall that he missed many activities with them because he had to babysit. If he minded, he seldom complained.
Despite his new name, Ted still considered himself a Cowell. It was always the Cowell side of the family to which he gravitated.
He looked like a Cowell. His features were a masculinized version of Louise Bundy’s, his coloring just like hers. On the surface, it seemed the only genetic input he’d received from his natural father was his height. Although still smaller than his peers in junior high school, Ted was already taller than Louise and Johnnie. One day he would reach six feet.
Ted spent time with his stepfather only grudgingly. Johnnie tried. He had accepted Louise’s child just as he had accepted her, and he’d been rather pleased to have a son. If Ted seemed increasingly removed from him, he put it down to burgeoning adolescence. In discipline, Louise had the final word, although Johnnie sometimes applied corporal punishment with a belt.
Ted and Johnnie often picked beans in the acres of verdant fields radiating out through the valleys beyond Tacoma. Between the two of them, they could make five to six dollars a day. If Bundy worked the early shift at Madigan Army Hospital as a cook—5 A.M. to 2 P.M.—they would hurry out to the fields and pick during the heat of the afternoon. If he worked a late shift, he would get up early anyway and help Ted with his paper route. Ted had seventy-eight customers along his early morning route and it took him a long time to work it alone.
Johnnie Bundy became a Boy Scout leader, and he frequently organized camping trips. More often than not, however, it was other people’s sons who went on the outings. Ted always seemed to have some excuse to beg off.
Oddly, Louise had never directly confirmed to Ted that she was, in fact, his mother and not his older sister. Sometimes he called her Mother, and sometimes just Louise.
Still, it was clear to everyone who knew them that this was the child she felt had the most potential. She felt he was special, that he was college material, and urged him to start saving for college when he was only thirteen or fourteen.
Although Ted was growing like a weed, he was very slender—too light for football in junior high. He attended Hunt Junior High, and did turn out for track, where he had some minor successes in the low hurdles.
Scholastically, he did much better. He usually managed to maintain a B average, and would stay up all night to finish a project if need be.
It was in junior high that Ted endured some merciless teasing from other boys. Some who attended Hunt Junior High recall that Ted invariably insisted on showering in privacy in a stall, shunning the open showers where the rest of his gym class whooped and hollered. Scornful of his shyness, the other boys delighted in creeping up the single shower stall and pouring cold water down on him. Humiliated and furious, he chased them away.
Ted attended Woodrow Wilson High School in Tacoma and became a member of the largest graduating class of that school to date. The class of 1965 had 740 members. Any search of records on Ted Bundy at Woodrow Wilson is fruitless. They have disappeared, but many of his friends remember him.
A young woman, now an attorney, recalls Ted at seventeen. “He was well known, popular, but not in the top crowd, but then neither was I. He was attractive, and well dressed, exceptionally well mannered. I know he must have dated, but I can’t ever remember seeing him with a date. I think I remember seeing him at the dances, especially the TOLOS, when the girls asked the boys to dance. But I can’t be sure. He was kind of shy, almost introverted.”
Ted’s best friends in high school were Jim Paulus, a short, compact young man with dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses who was active in student politics, and Kent Michaels, vice president of the student council, a reserve football team member, and now an attorney in Tacoma. Ted often skied with them, but, despite his awakening interest in politics, he did not hold a student body office.
In a class with almost 800 members, he was a medium-sized fish in a large pond. If not among the most popular, he at least moved near those at the top and he was well liked.
Scholastically, he was getting better. He consistently drew a B plus average. At graduation, he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.
Ted wrote an unusual note in a classmate’s copy of The Nova, Wilson High’s yearbook:
Dearest V.,
The sweetness of the spring time rain runs down the window pain [sic.] (I can’t help it. It just flows out)
Theodore Robert Bundy
Peot [sic]
The only fact that might mar the picture of the clean-cut young graduate in the spring of 1965 was that Ted had been picked up at least twice by juvenile authorities in Pierce County for suspicion of auto theft and burglary. There is no indication that he was ever confined, but his name was known to juvenile caseworkers. The records outlining the details of the incidents have long been shredded—the procedure followed when a juvenile reaches eighteen. Only a card remains with his name and the offenses listed.
Ted spent the summer of 1965 working for Tacoma City Light to save money for college, and he attended the University of Puget Sound for the school year 1965-66.
After working in the sawmill the next summer, Ted transferred to the University of Washington, where he began a program of intensive Chinese. He felt that China was the country that we would one day have to reckon with, and that a fluency in the language would be imperative.
Ted moved into McMahon Hall, a dormitory on the University campus. He had yet to have a serious involvement with a woman, although he had yearned for one. He was held back by his shyness and his feeling that he was not socially adept, that his background was stultifyingly middle-class, that he had nothing to offer the kind of woman he wanted.
When Ted met Stephanie Brooks in the spring of 1967 at McMahon Hall, he saw a woman who was the epitome of his dreams. Stephanie was like no girl he had ever seen before, and he considered her the most sophisticated, the most beautiful creature possible. He watched her, saw that she seemed to prefer football jocks, and hesitated to approach her. As he would write a dozen years later, “She and I had about as much in common as Sears and Roebuck does with Saks. I never considered S. with any more romantic interest than I considered some elegant creature on the fashion page.”
But they did share one common interest. Skiing. Stephanie had her own car, and he managed to hitch a ride to the mountain summits east of Seattle with her. As they rode back from a day’s skiing, he studied the beautiful, dark-haired girl behind the wheel. He had told himself that Stephanie outclassed him, and yet he realized that he was infatuated with her. He was both bemused and thrilled when she began to spend more and more time with him. His preoccupation with intensive Chinese was pushed temporarily into the background.
“It was at once sublime and overpowering,” he recalled. “The first touch of hands, the first kiss, the first night together. … For the next six years, S. and I would meet under the most tentative of circumstances.”
Ted had fallen in love. Stephanie was a year or so older, the daughter of a wealthy California family, and she was, quite possibly, the firs
t woman to initiate him into physical lovemaking. He was twenty years old. He had very little to offer her, a young woman who’d been raised in an atmosphere where money and prestige were taken for granted. And yet she stayed with him for a year, a year that may have been the most important in his life.
Ted worked a series of menial, low-paying jobs to pay his way through college: in a posh Seattle yacht club as a busboy, at Seattle’s venerable Olympic Hotel as a busboy, at a Safeway store stocking shelves, in a surgical supply house as a stockboy, as a legal messenger, and as a shoe clerk. He left most of these jobs of his own accord, usually after only a few months. Safeway personnel files evaluated him as “only fair,” and noted that he had simply failed to come to work one day. Both the surgical supply house and the messenger service hired him twice, however, and termed him a pleasant, dependable employee.
Ted became friends in August of 1967 with sixty-year-old Beatrice Sloan, who worked at the yacht club. Mrs. Sloan, a widow, found the young college student a lovable rascal, and Ted could talk her into almost anything when they worked at the yacht club together for the next six months, and they remained friends for many years after. She arranged for his job at the Olympic Hotel, a job that lasted only a month. Other employees reported they suspected he was rifling lockers. Mrs. Sloan was somewhat shocked when Ted showed her a uniform that he had stolen from the hotel, but she put it down as a boyish prank, as she would rationalize so many of his actions.
Beatrice Sloan heard all about Stephanie, and understood Ted’s need to impress this marvelous girl. She loaned him her car often, and he returned it in the wee hours of the morning. Once, Ted told her he was going to cook a gourmet meal for Stephanie, and the widow loaned him her best crystal and silver so that he could create the perfect setting. She laughed as he imitated the precise English accent he planned to use as he served the meal he’d cooked himself.
She felt that Ted needed her. He’d explained that his family life had been very strict, and that he was on his own now. She allowed him to use her address when he applied for jobs and as a reference. Sometimes he had no place to sleep except in the lounge of McMahon Hall, a dormitory he still had a key for. He was a “schemer,” she knew, but she thought she could understand why. He was only trying to survive.
Ted entertained her. Once, he put on a black wig and he seemed to take on an entirely different appearance. Later, she would catch a glimpse of him on television during Governor Rosellini’s campaign, and he was wearing that same wig.
Even though Mrs. Sloan suspected that Ted was sneaking girls up into the “crow’s nest” at the yacht club for what she called hanky-panky, and even though she also suspected him of taking money sometimes from the drunken patrons of the club who had to be driven home, she couldn’t help liking the young man. He took the time to talk to her, and he bragged to her that his father was a famous chef, and that he planned to go to Philadelphia to visit an uncle who was high up in politics. She even loaned him money once and then wished that she hadn’t. When he wouldn’t pay it back, she called Louise Bundy and asked that she remind Ted. Louise had laughed, according to Mrs. Sloan, and said, “You’re a fool to loan him money. You’ll never get it back. He’s a stranger around here.”
Stephanie Brooks was a junior when she met Ted in the spring of 1967, and she was in love with Ted through the summer and into 1968. But not as much in love as he was. They dated often—dates that did not require much money: walks, movies, hamburger dinners, and sometimes skiing. His lovemaking was sweet and gentle, and there were times when she thought it might really work out.
But Stephanie was pragmatic. It was wonderful to be in love, to have a college romance, and to stroll through the wooded paths of the campus hand-in-hand, as the Japanese cherry blossoms gave way to the rhododendrons and then to the brilliant orange of the vine maples. The skiing trips up to the Cascades were fun, too, but she sensed that Ted was foundering, that he had no real plans or real prospects for the future. Consciously or unconsciously, Stephanie wanted her life to continue as it always had. She wanted a husband who would fit into her world in California. She just didn’t believe that Ted Bundy fit that picture.
Stephanie found Ted very emotional and unsure of himself. He didn’t seem to have the capacity to decide what his major was going to be. But, more than that, she had a niggling suspicion that he used people, that he would become close to people who might do favors for him, and that he took advantage of them. She was sure that he had lied to her, that he had made up answers that sounded good. That bothered her. It bothered her more than his indecision, and his tendency to use people.
Stephanie graduated from the University of Washington in June 1968 and it seemed that that might be a way to ease out of the romance. Ted still had years to go, and she would be in San Francisco, starting a job, back among her old friends. The affair might just die of lack of nourishment due to time and distance.
But Ted won a scholarship to Stanford in intensive Chinese for the summer of 1968. He was only a short drive down the Bayshore Highway from her parents’ home, and so they continued to date throughout the summer. Stephanie was adamant when the time came for Ted to return to the University of Washington. She told him that their romance was over, that their lives were headed on divergent paths.
He was devastated. He could not believe that she was really through with him. She was his first love, the absolute personification of everything he wanted. And now she was willing to walk away from him. He had been right in the first place. She was too beautiful. Too rich. He should never have believed he could have her.
Ted returned to Seattle. He no longer cared about intensive Chinese. Indeed, he cared about very little. Yet, he still had a toehold on the political scene. In April of 1968, he’d been appointed Seattle chairman and assistant state chairman of the New Majority for Rockefeller, and he’d won a trip to the Miami convention. His mind filled with his break with Stephanie Brooks, Ted went to Miami, only to see his candidate plowed under.
Back at the University, he took courses—not in Chinese, but in urban planning and sociology. He didn’t come close to his previous excellence, and he dropped out of college. During the fall of 1968, Ted had worked as a driver for Art Fletcher, a popular black candidate for lieutenant governor. When there were death threats against Fletcher, the candidate was housed in a secret penthouse location. Ted became not only a driver, but a bodyguard, sleeping in a room close by. He wanted to carry a gun, but Fletcher vetoed that.
Fletcher lost the election.
It seemed that everything Ted had counted on was crumbling. In early 1969, he set out on travels that might help him understand his roots. He visited relatives in Arkansas and in Philadelphia, where he took some classes at Temple University. Yet all the while the real purpose of his trip burned in his mind.
His cousins, Alan and Jane Scott, with whom he’d grown up in Tacoma, had hinted at it. He himself had always known it, sensed the truth hidden there in memories from his earliest years. He had to know who he was.
Ted went to Burlington, Vermont, after checking records in Philadelphia. His birth certificate was in the files there, stamped with the archaic and cruel “illegitimate.” He had been born to Eleanor Louise Cowell. The name of the father was given as Lloyd Marshall, a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, an Air Force veteran, a salesman born in 1916.
So his father had been thirty years old when he was born, an educated man. Why had he left them alone? Had he been married? What had become of him? There is no information on whether Ted tried to find the man who had gone out of his life before he was even born. But Ted knew. He knew that what he had always sensed was true: Louise was, of course, his mother. Johnnie Bundy wasn’t his father, and his beloved grandfather wasn’t his father either. He had no father.
Ted had continued to write to Stephanie, with only sporadic response. He knew she was working for a brokerage firm in San Francisco. As he headed back toward the West Coast, he was obsessed with getting to Step
hanie. The knowledge that his mother had lied to him wasn’t a complete surprise. It wasn’t a surprise at all, and yet it hurt. All those years.
It was a bright spring day in 1969 when Stephanie walked out of her office building. She didn’t see Ted. There was suddenly someone behind her, someone putting his hands on her shoulders. She turned around and there he was.
If he had expected that she would be delighted to see him, that their romance could be resumed, he was to be harshly disappointed. She was moderately glad to see him, but nothing more than that. Ted seemed to be the same drifting young man she’d always known. He wasn’t even enrolled in college anymore.
Had she accepted him back at that point, some of his humiliation might have been tempered. But she couldn’t. She asked how he had gotten to San Francisco, and he was vague, mumbled something about hitchhiking. They talked for a while, and then she sent him away, for the second time.
She expected to never see him again.
3
SOMEHOW THE REVELATION about his parentage and the final rejection from the lost Stephanie, coming so close together in 1969, did not bury Ted Bundy. Instead, he became possessed of a kind of icy resolve. By God, if it took whatever he had, he was going to change. By sheer force of will, he would become the kind of man that the world, and particularly Stephanie, saw as a success. The years that followed would see an almost Horatio Alger-like metamorphosis in Ted.
He didn’t want to go back to McMahon Hall. The memories there were too filled with Stephanie. Instead, he walked the streets of the University District, knocking on doors of older homes that flanked the streets just west of the campus. At each door, he would smile and explain he was looking for a room, that he was a student in psychology at the University.
Freda Rogers, an elderly woman who, along with her husband, Ernst, owned the neat, white two-story frame house at 4143 12th N.E., was quite taken with Ted. She rented him a large room in the southwest corner of the home. He would live there for five years and become more of a son than a tenant to the Rogers family. Ernst Rogers was far from well, and Ted promised to help with heavy chores and the gardening, a promise he kept.