Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

Her tired eyes were glued to the letters her mother had loaned her. She’d seen some of them before when she was a teenager, but this time urgency drove her, not curiosity.

“Didn’t realize that serial killers had such great penmanship,” he said. “Thought they were more erratic in their letterforms. At least that’s been my experience.”

Grace looked over, a sly smile on her face.

“My mother wrote this,” she said, barely looking in his direction.

“Your mother? You said these were Bundy Letters.”

She nodded and started to fold the thin white paper with the florid cursive writing. “My mother is one smart woman. She actually copied the letters before she sent them so that she’d know exactly what Ted was responding to.”

“That doesn’t look like a photocopy,” he said.

Grace nodded. “I know. Get this, my mom hand-copied them. They didn’t have access to a home copy machine back then and dad didn’t want to spend ten cents a copy. Less money for the cause. Plus, I don’t think he thought this writing to Ted Bundy would get them anywhere.”

“It didn’t,” Shane said.

“It did,” she argued.

“How? In what way? He never admitted anything.”

“Not Tricia’s murder. There were some other tidbits that he spread throughout the letters that actually did help close cases in Utah and Oregon.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said, a little surprised by her disclosure. What else didn’t he know? They’d talked about Tricia’s disappearance hundreds of times.

Grace didn’t say so out loud. She didn’t need to. Somewhere in the letters of a crafty lunatic were the answers to what had happened to her sister… and just maybe what had happened to Kelsey, Lisa, and Emma.

A line her mother had written was both poignant and devastatingly true.

Sometimes, Ted, I think all of us are products of the good and bad done to us as children. Maybe that’s your story, too.

The other side of murder, the side from which the darkness was born, is not the need for some measure of sympathy. While most people blamed the mother, the father, the environment from which the murder emerged, Grace always considered homicidal tendencies to be generational. The road that Ted Bundy had been on when he killed his first victim had been one that was paved with the messy combination of evil and mental illness that his parents and their parents likely had unwittingly laid down before Ted was a sorry glare in his father’s eyes. Ted’s own grandmother had reportedly been treated for depression with electroshock therapy. She was also an agoraphobic, refusing to leave the safe confines of the family home. And while the confusion of his paternity would certainly traumatize any young person, Ted had exhibited a pathology and propensity for violence long before that issue emerged.

A relative, a teenage aunt, told the story of how she’d stirred from an afternoon nap to find Ted, only three, smiling at her in that way that really isn’t a smile, but an acknowledgment of something he’d done-or intended to do.

All around her were kitchen knives.

No one knows for sure why Louise left Philadelphia with five-year-old Teddy in 1951, although it is easy to guess. Shame and abuse had likely reached a level she could no longer endure. Louise needed a new life. She didn’t need to be the woman with the little boy who never knew his father. She could not have gone a greater distance than Tacoma, and that probably figured into her thinking, too. When she met Johnnie Bundy, a cook for a local hospital, he was everything she’d ever wanted. A Steady Eddie. A man who kept his promises. Decent with a capital D.

“Ted was grandiose even as a kid. He must have hated having a dad who was a hospital cook, not an airline pilot,” Grace said while Shane shifted his weight on the mattress and doubled up the pillow under his head.

“Or a lawyer,” Shane said.

“Right, one of those glamour jobs that he could brag about with the other boys. His dad worked in a hospital cafeteria. Even in working-class Tacoma that had to have been at the lower end of things,” she said.

“In a way, he always thought he was better than the Bundys,” Shane said. “He thought his stepfather was boring, didn’t make enough money, and wasn’t too smart.”

“Ted wanted to be better than them. Johnnie Bundy wasn’t sophisticated. He was just the quintessential average Joe, but his averageness was his goodness. He married Louise and adopted her son and raised him as his own.”

Shane shook his head. “He didn’t know what he was getting into.”

“No one could have seen what was coming.” Grace reached over and turned off the bedside light.

Tacoma is called Grit City, and it’s a nickname that fit like a grimy garden glove. And while there are stately mansions in the north end-places that were the homes of the lumber barons like the Weyerhaeusers-Ted’s world as a boy and a teen was decidedly more prosaic. Johnnie Bundy’s living was modest and their home, clothing, and cars reflected that. Ted’s true young adulthood is bit of a mystery. He’d tell people that he was addicted to magazines of murder and bondage, pornography with the most disgusting and vile images of evil done to women for the gratification of a small segment of the male audience. He immersed himself in true-crime documentaries, reveling in the depictions of lifeless, bloodied, female bodies.

And then, like a switch, he’d put on the mask and deny it all.

Ted was a teenager of the night, a junior night stalker. He’d steal beer, guzzle it down, and then start the walk. He’d follow the sliver of light from parted curtains and press up close to get a glimpse of a girl or woman in a state of undress. A voyeur, a peeper, whatever it was that Ted Bundy was before he became a killer, he perfected it.

A hunter. That was Ted.

Among Grace’s mother’s files was a photocopy of a letter that Ted had written to a television producer who had promised “to set the record straight” and tell the true story of Theodore Robert Bundy. In this missive, Ted reflected on his teenage years at Woodrow Wilson High.

You will put up any kind of piece of garbage that you want to and then try to justify it with some quick cutaways to people who really didn’t know me at all. That’s mostly everyone. I just wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t want to be part of the in crowd. I didn’t think that there really was an in crowd at that second-rate high school anyway. I had more going for me. So, yeah, I understand that you will do what you do. I did the minimum to just get through high school. Probably, Dan [the producer], you were a lot like me. Most people are. I know you are asking me to be introspective and I guess there is one thing that I could give you in that regards. I honestly didn’t see the point in having any of those people as friends. Or why I’d even want to? peace, Ted

It was after two in the morning, when Grace’s phone rang on the bedside table of the Alexanders’ Salmon Beach house. Shane stirred, but didn’t awaken completely. Among the many things they had in common, were nighttime calls from dispatchers, special agents in charge, partners, anyone who carried a badge and worked a case. At least a few times a month either’s phone would ring at this hour. This time it was her turn. Grace dropped her feet into her perfectly positioned slippers and grabbed the pink terry robe she left slung over a chair and started for the hallway.

It was Paul.

“What is it?” she asked, in a whisper.

“We found Emma or Kelsey, or maybe someone else.”

Grace had expected to hear this, but even as she did, it sickened her.

“Where?” she asked.

Some dogs barked; wherever he was calling from, the canine unit was there.