Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

The apartment?

Grace crawled on her hands and knees and found the door. Her hands felt for the knob, but it, too, was locked.

“Back away,” she said. “I’m going to fire my weapon to unlock the door.”

A muffled cry came through the wall. “Hurry.”

The gun fired and Grace pushed at the door. It wouldn’t budge.

“I’m going to try again. Please stay away from the door. Do you hear me?”

There was no response.

“Please stay away. I’m going to fire.”

Grace steadied herself in the smoke and shot once more. This time, the lock split and the door crashed open.

Inside, she found a teenage girl, unconscious and half naked.

Emma Rose was alive.

Paramedics carried Emma out on a stretcher into the yard, next to a maple that had already started to turn yellow. Flashing lights and sirens had turned what had been tranquil and beautiful into a nightmare of sorts. Several neighbors had gathered to gawk. One of them was a blond girl, young, pretty. She looked like an angel. When Emma looked up at her she smiled through the oxygen mask. She spoke, but no one could hear her.

“Thank you, Elizabeth Smart,” Emma said.

Grace Alexander sat on the back of the fire truck taking in some oxygen and insisting she was just fine.

“I need to call my husband,” she said. “We need to catch Peggy Howell. She’s responsible.”

The paramedic put his hand on her shoulder; it was a soft, reassuring touch. “Husband’s on his way. Your partner Detective Bateman’s over there.”

Grace looked over as Paul made his way through the chaos of the fire. A neighbor on the west side of the Howells’ house had the stream from a garden hose aimed at the roof of his garage, but that was hardly necessary. The Howell blaze was small, contained to the basement.

“We found the body. We found Emma’s kidnapper. Weird thing. Coroner says he’s been dead five days. Not long after he snatched Emma. This sick SOB.”

She got up. “What body?”

“Her son, I guess. Maybe a boyfriend. Two neighbors had differing ideas about the relationship.”

“Jeremy’s dead?”

“Yes, been dead a while.”

“Did you find his mother?”

“Sit tight. You’ve been through a lot today. But, yeah, we got her. Blues picked her up by the Safeway trying to buy, isn’t this ironic, a pack of smokes with a stolen credit card… Diana Rose’s Visa card.”

Grace felt so much relief, she felt her legs go weak. She sat back down. She wanted to call her mother, too. She wanted her to know that it was finally over. Peggy had been the killer. She’d betrayed them all.

“We found some weird shit inside the house,” he said, stepping back a little as an aid car left. “Good thing you’re sitting down.”

“What?”

“You think your mother was a Bundy collector? This gal had her beat tenfold. Photographs, letters, books, it’s like a murderbilia stage show gone wild in there. She even had cue cards for Ted.”

Grace didn’t understand. “Cue cards? What do you mean?”

Paul held one up in a plastic evidence bag. It was an index card, much like the kind her mother had used when she made Bundy flash cards. These were slightly larger and the writing on them was a sloppy printing.

TED: YOU ARE THE PRETTIEST BY FAR.

“Weird huh? Like she was making up some kind of play or something.”

“Not a play,” Grace said. “More like a fantasy come true.”

“Grace, we also found this,” he said, holding up the silver necklace with the dove dangling in the flashing lights of the aid car. “It was with her stash of Ted stuff. Right on top. Just sitting there.”

She reached for it and he let it fall into her palm.

Peggy had kept a souvenir. Just like the others.

Gregg Olsen

Fear Collector

Peggy Howell gave several interviews after she pleaded guilty to the murders of Tricia O’Hare, Kelsey Caldwell, and Lisa Lancaster, and the abduction and attempted murder of Emma Rose. She didn’t proclaim her innocence, like Ted had done at first. Instead, she rather appeared to bask in the glory of her crimes. She was not charged with her son’s murder. As it turned out, Jeremy Howell had committed suicide. His mother told a reporter for the News Tribune that “Jeremy was a wuss. He was nothing like his father.” She went on to say that she had that her biggest regret was not the murders, but the fact that “Jeremy couldn’t man up. I had to tell him what to say, what to do, how to hold a knife. When we caught Kelsey-that’s the first girl’s name, I think-he couldn’t even do what had to be done. I did. I showed him. Girl number two was no better. I gave him one last chance to be the man that he should be, but hell, he took the easy way out.”

Jeremy Howell was cremated after the autopsy that determined he’d died of a single gunshot wound to the head. His ashes remain unclaimed.

Emma Rose was released from Tacoma General Hospital after three days of treatment for exhaustion, smoke inhalation, and dehydration. She told People in a telephone interview from her hospital bed: “Three amazing women saved my life-Selena Gomez, Elizabeth Smart, and Grace Alexander.” She quit Starbucks and went off to college in California. Marine biology is her stated major.

Anna Sherman died on Christmas Day, never knowing for sure if her daughter, Susie, had been a victim of Ted Bundy or not. When the staff cleaned out her room at the assisted living center, they found a box of Ted memorabilia addressed to Grace Alexander with a small note written on the top: You did it for Tricia, please do it for Susie, too.

Tavio and Mimi Navarro welcomed their first baby, a girl, on January 14. They named her Catalina. Michael Navarro vanished. Police were able to track him to the Mexican border crossing in San Diego. After that, nothing.

Palmer Morton was arrested two months after the fire on Howard Street and charged with twenty-seven counts of fraud in a case that halted The Pointe development. He certainly had the resources to wriggle out of the charges by blaming the subcontractor. But it was a statement made by Emma Rose that clinched the case: “When I confronted him, he said that no one would believe me because I was a kid. He said that the subcontractor was stupid and he told them to find another dump location, one farther out of town. He knew what they were doing all along.”

Sissy O’Hare could finally really breathe again. Knowing what happened, who was responsible, had been the greatest gift of her life. She had never imagined that her daughter had been killed because she wanted someone-Peggy-to do the right thing. It seemed like Tricia.

Grace Alexander took a leave of absence from the Tacoma Police Department. She used the time to work on a book, My Sister’s Keeper — at husband Shane’s urging. She never finished it. She found out she was pregnant. Her baby was due in the the summer. She still has dinner with her mother every Wednesday. She told Paul Bateman that “my mom and I have never been closer. We both feel free of something that took over our lives.”

Tricia O’Hare is no longer considered a Bundy victim. The day after Peggy’s arrest, someone updated the victim list on Wikipedia by removing her name. Her bones were returned to Sissy the following spring, and she and Grace buried her next to Conner.