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

vanish. Zatkovich wasn’t so sure about Don. He thought he was a little shady, an odd duck, stern. And there were those calls that were made to the wrong Burr house, threatening “the matinee lover.” Strand agreed with his partner that the kidnapper must know Ann, must know the layout of the house, and must have coaxed her outside. At some point they made a bargain to quit smoking. Zatkovich did quit; Strand lasted a few days, then went back to his Camels.
    The Burr house was filled with relatives staying the night. Julie, Greg, and Mary were confused and scared. Julie, just seven, was suddenly the eldest of the children, a responsibility that would weigh on her. Ann wasn’t just Julie’s older sister—she was her best friend.
    “I remember being terrified to go upstairs to bed alone,” Julie recalled, “and to get from there to the safety of the main floor where my parents were. I couldn’t stay in the room Ann and I had shared for years, so I moved to an empty room on the other side of the house upstairs, and Mary moved into our room.”
    Bev tried to reassure her children. “They needed me very much, and I had to remember that. They were terrified. They asked, ‘Will he come and get us, too?’”

4
Ted
    TED HELD HIS nose. Tacoma stunk. He had always thought it stunk. He noticed it as soon as they arrived in the city, after his mother cruelly yanked him from his grandfather’s house—the only home and the only fatherfigure he had known—and brought him to this city that smelled. The smell’s origin was tidal flats, sulfur emissions from paper mills, and 100 years of chemicals dumped into Commencement Bay, creating one of the most polluted bodies of water in the country. The stink even had a name: the Tacoma Aroma. You tried to get out of its way when the wind was from the east.
    Ted was embarrassed by his family’s descent into working-class status and especially by the Nash Rambler his mother and step-father drove. Ted fantasized about being adopted by western actor Roy Rogers ( he wouldn’t drive a Nash Rambler). There would be money, and Ted would have his own horse.
    The boy admired his great-uncle John Cowell, whom he and Louise stayed with when they first arrived in Tacoma. John Cowell was as different from his older brother, Samuel, as he could be (except they both married women named Eleanor, which was also their mother’s name). Samuel, Ted’s grandfather, was the oldest of seven children; John was the youngest. Twenty-three years and a world of differences separated them.
    John Cowell was a music professor at the University of Puget Sound. While living in his home, Ted was introduced to the culture and status he longed for and thought he deserved. But he was just a temporary visitor and had to watch his cousin, a boy just a few months older than he was, thrive in the home Ted thought he should have. If Roy Rogers didn’t adopt him, maybe his great-uncle could.
    Cowell drove exotic European cars, which turned heads in Tacoma. After living and performing in Europe, he had a French Simca shipped home, and later he drove a Peugeot. “I know he was enamored of our family, he romanticized it,” Ted’s cousin Edna Cowell Martin said. There was a lot to romanticize. Her father wasn’t just a music teacher; he was a noted composer and performer. He’d been a piano prodigy at age six, won a scholarship to The Juilliard School as a teenager, been a student of Aaron Copland’s at Tanglewood, earned his graduate degree at the Yale School of Music, performed at Carnegie Hall, and was friends with Leonard Bernstein.
    In addition to riding in a Simca and a Peugeot, Edna and her older brother John (the cousin Ted envied), went to private schools in Europe and Seattle. The Cowells had a beach house near Longbranch, on a peninsula west of Tacoma. Edna remembers the Bundy family arriving for a visit, all crowded into the Nash Rambler.
    The Cowells were educated, well-traveled, and classy, but they