Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy by Rebecca Morris Read Free Book Online

logging in California. The couple was hiding something. They weren’t really the girl’s parents. They had left their children alone, and see what happens? Bev overheard a woman in a restaurant say, “You know who killed her—the mother.”
    Bev and Don were hurt by the rumors. Plus, the police were stepping up their questioning of Don, asking him pointed questions. So Bev and Don talked it over, asked a relative to stay with the children, and appeared at the police station insisting they wanted to take polygraph tests. The police agreed. Bev was nervous; what if the results made them look suspicious? But the test showed that neither was involved in Ann’s disappearance. Bev made sure the newspapers reported it.
    Don couldn’t just sit in the house and wait. He and Raleigh and their eldest brother Barney took a walk in the neighborhood. They were searching for Ann, of course. Raleigh was pleasantly startled when he heard a voice say, “Hi, Uncle Raleigh.” He turned around excitedly. “I thought it was Ann, but it was Greg,” he remembered. The three bothers walked up to the construction sites at the college. When they returned from their walk they made a suggestion to the police that was entered in that day’s police report: “Mr. Burr and a couple of his relatives went for a walk this evening, and when they returned said there are several excavation holes in the UPC [ sic ] area which are full of water several feet deep. Possibly the Public Works Department can be contacted today to pump out those holes in case the missing girl could have fallen in.” They were the same deep ditches where Don had seen the young man with the smirk that morning, kicking dirt back and forth with his foot as he watched the search for Ann. Many years later, when another Tacoma child became famous, Don was certain he recognized the face.
At 5:20 p.m. Don Burr answered the telephone and heard a young girl’s voice say:
    This is Ann Marie Burr …
Don swore that’s what he heard. But the police, who were nearby and monitoring the calls, were quite certain that the girl did not say her full name. They would never know for certain because the recording machine malfunctioned, and the call was not recorded. But Don believed it was his daughter’s voice.
Eight minutes later the phone rang again. This time
Det. Zatkovich answered it and a young girl’s voice said: This is Ann Marie….
    There was a brief pause, and then the caller hung up. This call was not recorded either. Were they prank calls? Ann never referred to herself as Ann Marie. But maybe a kidnapper had ordered her to say her name, and he thought she was called ‘Ann Marie.’ Wouldn’t a kidnapped child scream for their parent rather than recite their full name?
    When the horrible day came to an end, Bev put the children to bed. It was just like the evening before, but nothing like the evening before. Don put Ann’s cocker spaniel Barney on the landing. Detectives stayed in the basement in case the Burrs received a phone call from the kidnapper. Outside, unmarked police cars watched the house. They also watched the house of Mr. D___ , the exhibitionist that the police thought liked children and pregnant women a little too much.
    Detectives Zatkovich and Strand wrote in their report that night that… “…extensive questioning of the parents failed to shed any light on the girl’s disappearance. Both of them claim that she is an intelligent girl, although quiet; that she has good habits, obeys her parents, goes to bed early, sleeps well; however, she does read occasionally in the evening in bed and, to their knowledge, she has no problem of walking in her sleep or anything of that nature.”
    And then, for the first of hundreds of evenings to come, Detectives Tony Zatkovich and Ted Strand sat in Tony’s driveway in their white Chevy, the car they hoped wouldn’t give them away as cops, lit cigarette after cigarette, and talked about how an eight-year-old girl could