John Betancourt - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006

Patti had changed the subject. She looked at her mother, saying, Mom, please. I just want to get away from it for a while. All right? Away from everything. Here. I just want to be home. I just want to be your girl for a few nights. I have some money saved up. I can pay some room and board.

Crying then, she had said, Mom, please take care of me for a while. All right?

And Mom had been a bit cool, saying that her lawyer friend was trying to do the right thing, that’s all, but it was Patti’s life now, and if that’s what she wanted, and Mom talked like that as Patti washed and dried the dinner dishes, and that had been that.

A week or so later, after playing gin rummy with Mom and having one Budweiser too many, she had let it all go to her, her fears and memories and what it had been like, living with Ted and then seeing the police there, saying Ted was under arrest for kidnapping, was a suspect in a number of homicides, and would she please come along and talk to them.

All night long, it seemed, she had unburdened herself to Mom, even telling her that little secret of what she had called herself when she found out.

Mom, she said, it was like I was the Devil’s girlfriend. You know?

The damn Devil’s girlfriend.

And Mom had reached over and touched her wrist.

You poor girl, you poor, poor girl.

Then a month later. Standing in a supermarket checkout line in Randolph, scanning a tabloid magazine, she saw, on the bright paper cover, a picture of Ted and a picture of her. Patti Barnes. Taken during one of Ted’s court appearances, when she had walked down the courthouse steps. The screaming headline:

Hands shaking, she picked up the tabloid, opened it up. Saw the words she had told her mother, all the words that night, printed in black type upon white paper. Her secret words, told to her mother.

Right there.

She had walked away from the checkout counter, leaving behind the groceries, and went back to the trailer. Mom wasn’t there — she was working as a secretary at Denver First Savings’ downtown branch — so Patti had packed a bag and left.

She never talked to her mother, ever again.

The reporter is bright but not knowledgeable. Patti is sitting next to her on a bench right by the pond, across the street from Kut & Kurl. Her shift is now over and again, a part of her wonders why she agrees to talk to this young girl. What in God’s name could this girl know that would make any sense, any sense at all?

One of the first things Patti asks is, “How did you find me?”

“A tip.” There’s a shrug of her shoulders. “Somebody called in, said they recognized your face from a book written some years back. About Ted Bundy. The caller said Bundy’s girlfriend was working in town, at the Kut & Kurl.”

Patti is sure her face is flushed. “This helpful tipster. Man or woman?”

“Woman. But she didn’t leave her name.”

Patti folds her arms. “Of course not.”

The young girl flips a page in her notebook. “Ted Bundy was one of the world’s most famous mass murderers,” she starts, and Patti cuts her off right there.

“Sorry, dear, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Excuse me?”

Patti says, “Ted wasn’t a mass murderer.”

“He wasn’t? I mean, the numbers show that—”

“Ted wasn’t a mass murderer,” she presses on. “A mass murderer is someone who kills a lot of people all at once. Like those high school boys who shot up their school in Colorado. Or the loser who goes into a fast food restaurant and starts shooting up the place. That’s a mass murderer. Understand?”

The pen scribbles some more.

“Ted was a serial killer,” she says. “There’s a difference. A mass murderer usually acts out in a rage. Something triggers him, something inside him just snaps. He lets loose with his rage, all at once. And mass murderers... they usually end up dead. From cops or from suicide.

“But Ted was different. Ted was someone who killed over time. He had a... a craving. A fetish. Something that he wanted to do, month after month, year after year. A mass murderer will mostly kill whoever is there. But not Ted. Ted was a seducer. Ted was a hunter. He liked a particular kind of woman, and for the most part, that’s the type of woman he went after. And mass murderers, usually they’re stupid. But not Ted. He was smart. Quite smart.”

Scribble, scribble, scribble. And then the reporter looks up.

“I’m... I’m sorry to say this, but from what you said...”

“Yes?” she asks.

“It almost seems like you’re proud of him.”

Pride. There’s a thought.

Had she ever been proud of her boyfriend, the serial killer?

Once, and only once.

It was in Colorado, and Ted was getting ready for trial, right after being convicted for kidnapping, for having picked up a young woman who had been strong enough to fight back after finding herself in the VW. There had been hearings and lots of publicity and protests and Ted had continued to deny that he had anything to do with the murders of the young women in Colorado or Washington or Utah. The police and the prosecutors had been so sure of what they had accomplished, and how smart they had been to have captured the nation’s most notorious criminal.

And one day, he escaped.

Just like that.

Gone. Made a hole in the ceiling of his cell, crawled through the courthouse building, and got out.

And she had this little shiver of excitement that Ted was loose, was out there, on the run, free from whatever bonds were holding him back, and she was surprised at how unfearful she was. For Ted had never hurt her, had never threatened her, and had only promised love and affection and adventure. By then she was tired of all the official attention from the police and the courts and the reporters, most of them men, of course, and so yes, there was a sort of pride that Ted had outsmarted them all. It made the men a little less cocky, a little less confident, and she was pleased at how she felt.

Pride. Sure, there had been pride.

Until Ted ended up in Florida and bloodily slaughtered two college girls slumbering in their sorority house late one night.

The reporter asks all the right questions, yet Patti feels like the young girl is going through the motions, like she’s not sure what the big fuss is all about. After all, compared to what in hell was going on in the world today, Ted Bundy could now probably be considered a rank amateur. Have his own damn reality TV show or something.

She says, “Why did it take so long?”

“Why did what take so long?”

“To catch him. I mean, it sounds like he got caught because he made a few mistakes. Why did it take so long for the police to catch him?”

Patti shrugs. “It’s a huge country. And if a serial killer works in small towns, how often do the cops there communicate with other cops? Even if the cases are similar?”

The reporter scribbles away. Patti says, “Plus, he was just a bit sloppy. He killed a number of victims within a certain area. Imagine how many more he could have killed if he had just killed one woman, and then moved to another state, and so forth and so on. He could have killed scores more.”

The reporter looks up from her notebook and says, “Can I ask you a few personal questions?”

Patti sighs. “I guess so.”

She says, “Do you have any children?”

“No.”

“Ever been married?”

“Nope.”

“And why is that?” the reporter asks.

The answer is, of course, something she cannot reveal.

After Ted’s arrest in Florida for the murders of the sorority girls, Patti moved to Taos, New Mexico, because of an article she had read in an old National Geographic magazine while waiting in the dentist’s office. The pictures of the Spanish homes and crisp mountain ranges and blue-washed sky had always stayed with her.