Read Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy Online
Authors: Rebecca Morris
Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (26 page)
What Happened to Ann Marie Burr?
SALESMEN NO LONGER go door-to-door in North Tacoma selling pots and pans or plans for backyard bomb shelters. Gusty’s orchard, next to the Burr house, is gone; an apartment complex stands on the lot. The fraternities and dorms under construction at the University of Puget Sound in 1961 are showing their age. The areas that were deep ditches that summer are now just well-used city streets. Ann Marie Burr is probably entombed under one of them.
There were a few suspects, but no arrest. Tacoma police questioned thousands of people and gave polygraphs to hundreds of them during the Ann Marie Burr investigation. The leading suspects included the teenage neighbor boy who flirted with Ann; Ann’s cousin who grew up to be a child molester; and the two bean pickers from Oregon looking for work. Another was the traveling salesman who liked to take young girls for rides in his convertible. Police didn’t yet know the teenager from across town who was already experienced at peeping in windows, animal abuse, stealing, and scaring little girls.
Complicating the search for Ann was the dearth of clues: there were no witnesses, no physical evidence at the crime scene (according to the police report), no vehicle description or license plate, no fingerprints, no credible ransom demand, no motive, no weapon, no burial site, and no body. There was a footprint, and a single red thread. There may be no direct physical evidence linking Ted Bundy, or anybody else, to the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr, but as police say, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.
In August, 2011 the FBI announced it had added Ted Bundy’s DNA to a national databank in hopes it might solve some cold cases or eliminate him as a suspect in murders he has been tied to over the years. It used a vial of his blood drawn in 1978 when he was arrested in connection with the murder of 12-year old Kimberly Diane Leach. Julie Burr was asked to give a sample of her DNA to Tacoma police. They say they have evidence from Ann’s disappearance that has never been analyzed.
For more than five years, detectives Ted Strand and Tony Zatkovich worked to solve the case. After they retired, they spent another 30 years doing what they did best—talking it through. It was how they had solved hundreds of other crimes. They were still trying to solve the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr when they died.
What nearly everyone agreed on—50 years ago and today—is that Ann Marie Burr probably knew the person who took her, and is most likely buried somewhere nearby.
Detective Tony Zatkovich said that the Ann Burr case was the only one he and Ted Strand ever disagreed on. In a
News Tribune
article published in September, 1999, at the time of the family’s memorial service for Ann, Zatkovich said, “Bundy had absolutely nothing to do with this. He was a real murderer and one of the worst, but he didn’t have anything to do with this.”
But Ted Bundy’s hypothetical confession before he was executed has gained credibility over the years. In the same story where Zatkovich discounts Ted as a suspect, Tacoma Detective Larry Lindberg, described as “currently assigned to the Burr case,” (missing child cases are never closed), was quoted as saying the police “are pretty sure Bundy was the killer.” In 2010, Tacoma police homicide detective Lindsey Wade took over the cold case.
Zatkovich’s favorite suspect remained Robert Bruzas, the 15-year-old neighbor of Ann’s. He and Ann were friendly, even flirtatious. For 50 years Bruzas has lived with the knowledge that he was Zatkovich’s chief suspect. “I knew that, but it doesn’t bother me a bit,” Bruzas said. He attributes not passing his first polygraph to nerves. “They had me scared to death,” he says of his two interrogations at the hands of Zatkovich and Strand.
Detective Strand thought the best suspect was Ralph Everett Larkee, the automotive parts salesman from Spokane who in 1964 took 10-year-old Gay Lynn Stewart on a ride around the Northwest in his Buick convertible and shot himself with the FBI at his door. There’s no record of why Strand was convinced that Larkee had taken Ann Burr. Maybe it was in the part of the file that is lost.
The two detectives never ruled out Richard Raymond McLish who said he and a friend had taken Ann and buried her on an Oregon farm.
Author Ann Rule is asked more often about the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr than about any other case. She believes it was Ted Bundy’s first murder. “I still do think it was Ted,” she said. The coincidences—that Ted had lived nearby when he and Louise first moved to Tacoma, that he was a paperboy, that his last victim was 12 years old—is more convincing than Ted’s excuses that he was too young at the time and lived too far from the Burr house.
The details in his confession match the facts of the case. How did he know about the apple orchard next door, or exactly which upstairs bedroom Ann slept in? Robert Cour’s article in
Master Detective
in 1966 mentioned the window being up, the door unlocked from the inside and standing open, and Don seeing what looked like a workman standing over a ditch. Had Ted read, and remembered, that story, published when he was a teenager? Or did he know the details because he was the one standing by the ditch?
Ted hypothesized to Holmes that a killer could have started at age 14 or 15 by murdering an eight- or-nineyear-old girl, and said that committing a murder when young was a “mystical, exciting,…overwhelming experience.” And Ted told Dr. Lewis and others that
something
had happened to him when he was 14 or 15. The only other murder Ted would never discuss, even hypothetically, was his last, that of 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach.
Bob Keppel was the last person to ask Ted about Ann Marie Burr. It was two days before Ted was executed. “He was tired, he was frustrated, he was looking for any way to get out of the execution. It would have been [an] ideal time for him to talk about a missing victim who had not been found. It would show how he was trying to provide information,” Keppel said. But by then, Ted knew that Florida’s governor was not going to negotiate. Keppel said he doesn’t know who killed Ann Marie Burr, but he doesn’t think it was Ted Bundy. “I deal in probabilities, not possibilities,” Keppel said.
Like Holmes, Keppel believes there are some victims that killers don’t talk about. Ted even mentioned it. “He had indicated to me that there were crimes that serial killers would never reveal to authorities because they held a special meaning to them, such as a child, someone they knew, or someone close to home,” Keppel said.
When Ted’s possible involvement with the Ann Marie Burr case was resurrected at the time of her memorial mass in 1999, Louise Bundy told The
News Tribune
, “I feel so sorry for the Burr family because they’ve sort of latched onto this. But he couldn’t have done it.”
Of course, the Burr family wouldn’t have “latched” onto the possibility of Ted’s involvement if he hadn’t described his movements that morning, down to the shuffling of dirt with his feet and watching the police talk to Bev and Don.
Ted’s family remains angry that he is still a suspect in the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr. His sister, Linda Bussey, called it “ancient, ancient history.”
“It’s disgusting, it’s maddening,” she said. “He had nothing to do with her disappearance. He was a young kid. People thought he was the Green River Killer, too. We might as well say he raped and murdered everyone.” Ted’s cousin, Edna Cowell Martin, is more pragmatic. She thinks that the fact that Ted lived a couple of miles west on Skyline Drive in 1961 makes his involvement less likely.
Ann was up and down a couple of times during the night, taking the crying Mary to their parent’s room. Did Ann see someone she knew at the window during one of those trips? Did she unlock the front door for him? Or did someone familiar with the house climb through the window and enter Ann’s upstairs bedroom? Was she silenced in her room or in the orchard next door? Sunrise was 6:27 that morning. Bev Burr discovered her daughter missing between 5:15 and 5:30 a.m., but Ann could have been gone for hours. If it was still dark when Ann was taken, it would only take a few minutes to take her to the orchard and then two blocks west to the UPS campus, or one block east to the sewer construction project, or put her in a car.
For four years I’ve studied UPS building plans, city sewer plans, researched the childhood (and adult years) of Ted Bundy, talked to dozens of people who knew him well, investigated other suspects, and spent hundreds of hours with the Burr family. I think Ted Bundy lured Ann Marie Burr out of her home and killed her. Bev Burr and Louise Bundy didn’t think their children knew each other. But Sandi Holt says she knows they did—because she knew them
both
. Ann reportedly followed Ted around “like a puppy dog.” Maybe Ann watched him get his newspapers ready to deliver, like she did Robert. Maybe Ted flirted with Ann, like the other neighbor boys and some of her cousins did. She was comfortable around teenagers.
I believe Ted was the prowler that the Burr’s and others in the neighborhood reported seeing and hearing in the weeks leading up to Ann’s disappearance. He crawled through the living room window and went up to her bedroom. Or maybe he saw Ann passing through the house with Mary that evening, leaned through the window, and asked her to open the front door. Ann, seeing his familiar face, feeling safe with him, thinking the day was beginning with an adventure, left her bedroom with him, or undid the chain lock and opened the door. Then he took her by the hand and out into the pre-dawn morning.
Unknown hitchhiker, early September, 1974 Idaho Lynda Ann Healy–January 31/February 1, 1974 Seattle, Washington
Donna Gail Manson–March 12, 1974 Olympia, Washington
Susan Rancourt–April 17, 1974 Ellensburg, Washington Roberta Kathleen Parks–May 6, 1974 Corvallis, Oregon Brenda Ball–June 1, 1974 Seattle, Washington
Janice Ott–July 14, 1974 Lake Sammamish, Washington Denise Naslund–July 14, 1974 Lake Sammamish, Washington
Nancy Wilcox–October 2, 1974 Salt Lake City, Utah Melissa Smith–October 18, 1974 Salt Lake City, Utah Laura Aime–October 31, 1974 Salt Lake City, Utah
Debra Kent–November 8, 1974 Murray, Utah Caryn Campbell–January 12, 1975 Snowmass, Colorado Julie Cunningham–March 15, 1975 Vail, Colorado Denise Oliverson–April 6, 1975 Grand Junction, Colorado Lynette Culver–May 6, 1975 Pocatello, Idaho
Susan Curtis–June 27, 1975 Provo, Utah
Margaret Bowman–January 15, 1978 Tallahassee, Florida Lisa Levy–January 15, 1978 Tallahassee, Florida
Karen Chandler (survived)–January 15, 1978 Tallahassee, Florida
Cheryl Thomas (survived)–January, 15, 1978 Tallahassee, Florida
Kimberly Diane Leach–February 9, 1978 Lake City, Florida
Bundy confessed to at least seven other murders which law enforcement authorities have not identified by name and have not found a body.
Data is from U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992, and other documents.
Ann Marie Burr disappeared in Tacoma, Washington, August 31, 1961
Two United Airlines stewardesses, one killed, one survived, Seattle, Washington, June 23, 1966
Two coeds killed at New Jersey shore, Memorial Day weekend, 1969
Kerry May-Hardy, missing from Seattle’s Capitol Hill, June, 1972 (remains found September, 2010)
Number of Victims
When he was arrested in Florida in 1978 and his killing spree was finally over, Ted Bundy intimated to police that he had killed hundreds of woman and girls.
An FBI report stated he had killed 30 women and girls in six states, of which 20 murders were verified. An FBI agent told Florida authorities the night before Bundy was executed that there were 50 victims.
Bundy suggested to serial killer researcher Ronald Holmes that there were more than 300 victims, including women in a total of 10 states.
Prologue
Interviews with Beverly Burr and Sandi Holt.
Tacoma Police Department, Missing Person Report on Ann Marie Burr, case #176685, August 31, 1961–October 16, 1967.
,
Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Morgan, Murray, “Murray’s People,” Tacoma Public Library Northwest Room.
Chapter 1
Interviews with Ann Rule, Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Polly Nelson, and Edna Martin.
Kendall, Elizabeth,
The Phantom Prince—My Life With Ted Bundy
(Madrona Publishers: 1981).
Nelson, Polly,
Defending the Devil
(William Morrow and Company, Inc: 1994).
MacPherson, Myra, “The Roots of Evil,”
Vanity Fair,
May 1989.
Magid, Ken and McKelvey, Carole A.,
High Risk: Children
Michaud, Stephen G. and Aynesworth, Hugh,
The Only Living Witness
(Signet: 1989) and
Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer
(Authorlink Press: 2000).
The Stranger Beside Me
(Penguin: 20
th
anniversary edition 2001).
Ascione, Frank R., “Animal Abuse and Youth Violence,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2002.
Kivenson-Baron, Inbal, “Fearlessness in Preschoolers: An Extreme End of the Approach and Withdrawal Temperamental Dimension,” University of Haifa Faculty of Education, Haifa, Israel, 2010.
Lewis, Dorothy Otnow M.D., Yeager, Catherine A. M.A., et. al., “Objective Documentation of Child Abuse and Dissociation in 12 Murderers With Dissociative Identity Disorder,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
, December 1997.
Interviews with: Beverly Burr, Robert Bruzas, Fran Bruzas Trierweiler, Dick Zatkovich, Ted Strand, Julie Burr, Raleigh Burr, Bonnie Taschler, Eddie Cavallo, Roland Otis, and Yvonne Doherty.
Tacoma Police Department, Missing Person Report on Ann Marie Burr, case #176685, August 31, 1961–October 16, 1967.